


love letters

by kinases



Category: Infinite (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-09-06 10:20:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 39,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8746540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinases/pseuds/kinases
Summary: for some reason, no matter where or when it is, they always end up finding each other.(a series of woogyu + yeolsoo drabbles set in various aus)





	1. that summer

**Author's Note:**

> here's a chapter index since this collection's grown larger than i'd expected ^__^ 
> 
> that summer— flower shop au, wg  
> lately— veterinarian au, wg  
> wings— figure skating au, wg  
> betting— gang au, wg  
> the chaser— harry potter au, wg  
> moonlight— joseon au, wg  
> entrust— high school chatfic au, wg  
> be mine— shelter au, wg  
> breathe— escort au, wg  
> the answer— hybrid au, wg  
> nothing’s over— mr & mrs smith au, ys  
> everyday— i can see your voice au, wg  
> between me and you— chaebol au, ys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where [woohyun](http://cfile25.uf.tistory.com/image/264B023D584AC60A0A107A) owns a flower shop and sunggyu works in the office next door | g | 1134

woohyun loves his job. camellias, bellflowers, snowdrops—woohyun could spend the entire day in the nursery, taking a look at how his plants are growing and checking up on his sprouts. business is good: he gets plenty of lovestruck high schoolers hoping to buy roses for their crushes and lots of bored housewives looking to brighten up their kitchens with an arrangement or two.

most of his customers are one-timers, though. flowers are expensive, and it’s not something most people can afford on a daily basis. there’s an office next door to his flower shop. it’s a high-rise, and woohyun doesn’t even know how high up into the air it goes, or for how long it’s been there, or even what kind of businesses are in that building. what he does know, though, is that there’s a weekly meeting one of the offices in the high-rise has, one that always has a centerpiece in the middle of the table. woohyun knows this because one of the workers there comes down to his flower shop every friday morning and orders the same arrangement every time.

“not too fond of spontaneity, huh?” woohyun jokes after the third time the man shows up at the counter with his credit card in hand. the man’s eyebrows furrow.

“no?” he half-asks, half-states, and woohyun has to hold back a laugh. there’s something cute, endearing almost, about the way the man takes the flowers from him and cradles them in his arms the way he would to a dog. woohyun waves him off, and he turns his attention to the girl and her mother holding a bouquet of lilies.

woohyun learns more about the man as the weeks go by. sometimes, he requests a slight change to the arrangement, which woohyun takes care of in front of him. he learns that the man’s name is sunggyu, that he’s an accountant, that his office always sends him to grab the centerpieces for the week’s meeting.

“it’s not too bad, though. the meetings, i mean. they’re a little long, but what can you do about it? nothing, exactly,” sunggyu says one day as he watches woohyun replace one of the carnations with a chrysanthemum. woohyun hums, and he grabs one of the shears on the counter to nick off a stray leaf. when woohyun looks back at sunggyu, his eyebrows are creased in the middle again. “sorry if this is a little rude, but do you like it?”

“like what?” woohyun asks, mid-shear. sunggyu gestures at the arrangement he’s working on. “oh, well, the flowers your boss chose are very nice. they're very in season, and the colors all match well. it gives off a very spring-like feeling. very bright. i like it.”

“no, i mean your job.” sunggyu’s worrying his lip under his teeth, and woohyun wonders if he even knows that he’s doing it. woohyun guesses that he should’ve known, though, what sunggyu was really hinting at.

“i love it,” woohyun says honestly. and he does: he loves the mixture of the smells of the different blooms, he loves the way there’s a science to the care that he has to put into each different one, he loves how he’s gotten to meet so many interesting and different people through what he does.

“it suits you,” sunggyu says, a small smile on his face as he stands up. he pays for the flowers as usual, and when he takes the centerpiece in his arms and cradles them the same way again, woohyun feels something deep in his chest, like his heart is leaping. he presses the base of his palm to his chest.

“shut up,” he tells his heart. his heart doesn’t listen to him. figures.

they continue like this for another month, where woohyun ignores the way his palms get sweaty whenever sunggyu smiles at him, where woohyun has to give sunggyu flowers every week and pretend like these are the flowers he actually wants sunggyu to have. then one week, sunggyu doesn’t show up. woohyun waits there, tapping his fingers against the counter, until he gets an email from the company sunggyu works for.

_hello. please bring the arrangement to room 308, our receptionist will buzz you in. thank you, and sorry for the inconvenience._

woohyun locks up his shop and brings the arrangement upstairs, and he has to will himself not to be too disappointed when he doesn’t see sunggyu among the black-suited men sitting around the conference table.

the week after that, sunggyu appears, as always. he has a mask on around his face, and the teasing joke that was just on the tip of woohyun’s tongue disappears in a flash. “are you alright?” woohyun asks, worry creeping into his voice.

sunggyu nods, then gestures at his throat. he can’t speak, then, woohyun guesses. “that must be some nasty summer cold going around,” woohyun says, frowning.

sunggyu nods again, then he walks to the counter to pay for this week’s flowers. woohyun takes his card and runs it through, then passes the card back to its owner. sunggyu’s about to reach for the centerpiece that’s sitting on the counter when woohyun stops him, ducking back behind the counter.

woohyun's palms are sweaty again, and his blood is rushing through his ears, and he feels like he can’t breathe, but he knows that if he doesn’t do this, he’ll never get a chance to. he takes a deep breath and reaches for the small bouquet he’d set aside this morning. sunggyu’s eyebrows rise almost to his hairline when woohyun passes him the bouquet of sunflowers. his eyes are full of confusion, and he’s about to pull his mask down to ask about these flowers when woohyun stops him before he can even speak.

“these are for you. from me. they’re on the house, you could say.” woohyun grins at sunggyu, leaning across the counter. “have a nice day, then!”

sunggyu’s expression is still as bemused as ever when he takes the arrangement and the sunflowers, pushing the door open with his hip when he leaves, and woohyun has to resist the urge not to take a photo of sunggyu with so many flowers in his arms like that.

he wonders if sunggyu’s going to notice the card he’d slipped in with the flowers. wonders if sunggyu’s going to read what’s inside the card, wonders if sunggyu’s going to respond to what woohyun has to say to him. he wonders if sunggyu even knows what sunflowers mean in the language of the flowers, but he supposes he’ll find out his answer soon enough.

_hey there._

_sorry if this is cheesy, but i think i really really really adore you very very very much. would you like to go out to dinner with me sometime?_

_circle yes or no!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here's the first installment of my au drabble series! updates will likely be every week, and feel free to drop any prompts for me on twitter n__n feedback is, as always, appreciated! ♡


	2. lately

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where [sunggyu](http://i.imgur.com/dcKPoiT.gif) is a veterinarian and woohyun’s dog is sick | g | 1036

“hi, dubu,” sunggyu calls out, bending down to one of the cages in the office. he watches as dubu raises her head to look up at him, and she laps at his fingers when he reaches his hand through the bars. she’s tired, but sunggyu doesn’t blame her at all.

her owner had brought her in the night before for her to deliver her pups, and she’d given birth overnight while sunggyu was working a late shift. all eight of her pups are asleep, nestled against her stomach, and sunggyu gives her a last scratch under her chin before he stands back up. there’s work to do. he wipes down the operating table, restocks all of the syringes and gloves, and goes over the day’s schedule of appointments. he groans when he sees how many there are, but that annoyance very quickly gets squashed when he sees just how many of the animals have serious conditions. he’ll talk to sungyeol about double-booking him some other day.

the day passes by in a rush of surgeries and consultations. dubu’s owner comes to pick her and her pups up, and she’s beyond grateful that sunggyu’s cared for them during the day as well. he tells her that it’s no problem, that it comes with the job, but she still looks too awestruck for sunggyu’s liking. sunggyu’s beyond tired when the clock strikes five and his last patient hops off the table and into his owner’s arms, meowing as he does so. myungsoo cradles byul closer, patting him on the head before he looks at sunggyu.

“is he really going to be okay?” myungsoo asks, and there’s no small amount of worry in his voice. byul meows again, curling into myungsoo’s sweater, and sunggyu grins. it’s hard not to let himself smile at that.

“he’s fine. it was just a little scratch. it’ll heal in just a few days,” sunggyu says, leaning forward to scratch byul on his stomach. “he’s going to be alright, but if you could keep him away from larger and more aggressive cats, i think it would help his recovery and also get him out of any future fights.”

myungsoo nods vigorously, letting his cat dig his paws into myungsoo’s sweater, and he bows before he leaves. “thanks, hyung,” he says, but sunggyu knows he’s not really going to leave yet. he’s going to wait in the lobby until sungyeol finishes cleaning up, and then he's going to go home together with his roommate.

it’s a few minutes after sungyeol packs up and leaves that there’s an insistent knocking on the front door. sunggyu ambles out to the door, a refusal on his lips, when he sees who’s at the door. there’s a guy with bleached blond hair with his fists against the door and a small brown puff in his arms. sunggyu’s heart sinks. they’ve already closed, but there’s no way he’s letting something like this go by.

he unlocks the door, and the man stumbles in, still holding his dog closely. “thank you so much,” the man breathes out. “everywhere else was closed, and i just didn’t know where to go. sorry, i know you guys are already closed.”

“no problem. it’s my job to help all i can,” sunggyu replies automatically. he bends down so he can get a closer look. the dog doesn’t seem to be injured, but he looks back up at the owner’s face. “what seems to be the problem here?”

“he—kongdduk, that’s my dog—acts kind of weird sometimes. last week, he started tilting towards his right side when he walked. and now, it hurts for him to open his mouth and eat, so he just doesn’t eat what i put out for him.” the man’s lower lip trembles. “i thought nothing was wrong, but he’s started losing a lot of weight, and i don’t know what to do.”

“i’ll look at him and let you know what’s wrong, alright?” sunggyu doesn’t like to make promises, especially not in this line of work. he leads the man and his dog into the back office, and he suspects that he’ll be out before he thinks. the tests confirm what he thinks it is, and he holds out the results to the man and watches the way the man’s hands tremble as he takes the sheaf of papers.

“what kongdduk here has is an ear infection. it’s a very mild form, so i think he’ll be fine as long as you give him antibiotics,” sunggyu says, and he holds out another sheet of paper. “here’s the prescription for the medicine for him, and you can pick it up tomorrow morning when our pharmacy opens. i can show you how to administer the medication for him tomorrow, and you have to be sure to follow how often it says to give him the medicine, alright?”

the man nods, and sunggyu continues. “we’ll just have to have you and kongdduk come in about two or three weeks from now just to make sure he’s recovered and that his condition’s stable. but other than that, do you have any questions?”

the man’s silent for a bit, and sunggyu lets him take his time as he cradles kongdduk in his arms. sunggyu’s never really realized before now, since he’d been so busy with actually performing the tests, but kongdduk really does suit his name. rice cake.

“i feel really bad about making you stay after you were supposed to leave,” the man says, and sunggyu’s about to say that it’s not his fault, that sunggyu’s glad to have been able to help, when he continues speaking. “let me make it up to you with lunch? tomorrow?”

sunggyu stares at the man’s eyes, clear and honest, and he’s about to cite some law against dating a customer when he remembers just how single his life is right now, and he decides _fuck it_. “sure, we can grab lunch after i give you your dog’s meds. try not to get there after the place closes. oh, by the way, my name’s sunggyu.”

“i’m woohyun,” the man says, running a hand through his dog’s fur, and his eyes are twinkling and his smile is possibly brighter than the sun itself. “see you tomorrow.”

tomorrow, then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hehehehahahahahohohohohoho time to rewatch birth of a family ♡___♡


	3. wings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where [woohyun](http://cfile5.uf.tistory.com/image/274B2F4A583A76CE022483) is a figure skater and sunggyu is his coach | g | 1378

he’s always felt at home on the ice. it’s where he feels free, and it’s like all of the worries of the world just melt away when the blades of his boots slice through the ice. woohyun breathes out, gliding around the rink in lazy figure eights. even so, he’s aware of the eyes watching him—the only other person in this rink right now except for him.

sunggyu stands at the other side of the rink, his phone in one hand and a notebook in the other. sunggyu’s usually videotaping him when he does a routine, just so he can run through them with woohyun and help him keep track of his progress, but sometimes, he pulls out the notebook and just doodles. he says it’s to keep him alert and awake whenever woohyun skates, griping that woohyun’s routines are too boring, too long, too monotonous. 

woohyun has to hold back a laugh when he circles over to where sunggyu is, bracing himself against the glass wall separating the audience from the performers. after all, it’s not woohyun’s fault if his routines are boring and long and monotonous: sunggyu’s the one who choreographs them in the first place. 

sunggyu’s nose is pink from the cold, and woohyun reaches out to bop him on the very tip, before patting his cheeks with both hands. “you look like a reindeer,” woohyun teases, letting his hands linger on sunggyu’s skin for longer than he really has to.

sunggyu bats his hands away, scowling. “are you sure you even have time to be screwing around like this?” the crease between sunggyu’s eyebrows deepens. “the grand prix final is next week, you know.” 

woohyun knows. he’d had only a few weeks in between both the nhk trophy and the trophée bompard, ending up with a silver in tokyo and managing to cinch the gold in paris, and the days are winding down until the final in goyang in just under a week. he’s coming into this with an advantage: it’s home here, and it’ll make it easier on him that he won’t have to fly out to a competition this important. his parents are going to come watch and his brother’s already made plans to get out of work to come see him.

woohyun leans forward, just enough that he can press his forehead against sunggyu’s, and he whispers, “i know. i’ll do well. just watch me.” 

and then he’s pushing himself off the wall, skating around the rink another few times before he comes to a stop in the center. he breathes, in and out, and then the music starts. he loses himself in the choreography, running through all of his jumps and step sequences and spins. 

spread eagle. double axel. triple toe. sit spin. triple lutz. double toe. double loop—

woohyun crashes to the ice harder than he’d expected, feeling the cold seeping through his sweatshirt and into his skin. then he hears shouting and the sound of footsteps, and he knows sunggyu’s running over to where he’d collided into the wall and fallen.

“are you okay?” sunggyu’s hands are the gentlest they’ve ever been when he’s helping woohyun stand, running over woohyun’s face and across his back, probing. he moves his hands away when woohyun hisses, and he knows there’s going to be a bruise there in the morning. sunggyu’s eyes are worried when woohyun lifts up his hoodie, and sure enough, there’s a blotchy red mark just over woohyun’s hip on the soft skin of his stomach.

“i’m fine,” woohyun says, pressing a hand to the bruise. it doesn’t hurt too much. it’s just a minor inconvenience, and woohyun knows he’ll get better by the time the grand prix rolls around. he has to. “probably just tired.” 

woohyun’s been in the rink since eight in the morning, and it’s nearing seven at night now. as if his body’s just remembered how long he’s been in there, his stomach grumbles, and sunggyu’s rumbles in synchronization with his. sunggyu’s been there just as long as he has, after all; he’s the one who dragged woohyun out of bed and bundled him into the car and drove him to the skating center.

“maybe we should go home now.” the grin woohyun gives sunggyu is wry, and he feels warmth blossoming in him when sunggyu returns the smile. he takes the skate guards sunggyu gives him, and he bends down to put them on.

“yeah,” sunggyu agrees, and his arm is warm around woohyun’s waist as he guides him back to the locker room to change. he stands there and taps a pen against his notebook as woohyun takes his time changing out of the pants he’d worn to skate and into jeans.

“i’m so hungry. make me food,” woohyun whines when he gets into the car, leaning over to nuzzle his head against sunggyu’s shoulder. sunggyu swats him away, forcing him to sit upright again.

“oh my god, shut up, i’m driving,” sunggyu says in between clenched teeth, and woohyun thinks he could never get bored of this. he spends the rest of the car ride home humming the music sunggyu had choreographed his free skates and short programs to, and he tries not to smile too widely when sunggyu hums it under his breath as well.

dinner is uneventful, just rice with bulgogi and some salad on the side. sunggyu watches him over his bowl, a constant reminder to woohyun that he has to watch his weight for the coming competition. he wishes, not for the first time, that he could be like sunggyu and retire already so that he can eat anything and everything he wants to. maybe next season he’ll finally throw in the towel.

but there’s a reason he can’t let himself retire yet. later that night, as their sweat cools on their bodies and woohyun has sunggyu’s nose pressed into his shoulder, sunggyu making soft snuffling noises in his sleep, woohyun lets himself remember. he’d been twelve and sunggyu fourteen when they’d met for the first time, competing in the junior nationals here at home. 

he’d followed sunggyu to the senior competitions, trailing, always trailing, behind him in the podium standings. the day he’d finally taken gold over sunggyu’s silver had been one of the greatest days in his life, and sunggyu had congratulated him on it later, a bright smile stretching across his lips, and woohyun had desperately quashed down his desire to kiss that smile off his face.

he’d watched, frozen in shock, as sunggyu had fallen on a jump he’d practiced so many times during a routine he’d learned to death, as sunggyu had laid there, unmoving, on the ice as the entire world’s eyes were trained on the international stage. woohyun had learned later that sunggyu had torn one of his ligaments, and he’d nearly cried when he’d found out that sunggyu wouldn’t be able to compete again that season.

he’d only kept his emotions in check because, when he’d circled around to the locker room, he could hear the hacking sobs from inside and he’d known that no matter how broken and hurt he was feeling inside, sunggyu had it so many times worse. sunggyu had approached him first about coaching, and woohyun could see it then, the hunger in his eyes to live through someone else to be on the ice. woohyun had accepted without a second thought.

he doesn’t regret it at all, and he hopes, he knows, that sunggyu doesn’t either. it’s why he wakes up so early, earlier than even sunggyu does, and pretends to be asleep when sunggyu finally gets up to go to the rink. it’s why he’s willing to stay up so late to practice his routines, going over every motion in his head until he’s sure he can do it in his sleep. he’ll get to the olympics this year, and when he gets there, he’ll get the gold—the gold that sunggyu had been so close to getting four years ago. 

a gold medal is a small price to pay in exchange for the wings that sunggyu’s routines have given him, and woohyun knows he’ll do anything it takes to make it happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i love figure skating 8_8 i had [scheherazade](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPtqRjirC6o) in mind for woohyun's routine..!! hmu if you wanna talk about figure skating or infinite heh ^__^


	4. betting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where woohyun is the leader of a gang and [sunggyu](https://media.giphy.com/media/9f3sdjeiX9bfa/giphy.gif) is a stray he picks up | e | 1587

sunggyu doesn’t remember much of his life before woohyun, doesn’t remember his childhood before he’d been forced to live on his own. he’s lived on the streets for as long as he knows, always too proud to beg for food during the daytime, always hungry when he lies down for the night. he’s had a place to go back to, a place he’d shared with some other people who were down on their luck like he was, but it’s not a home by any means, and he’s had to fight for his life more times than he cares to remember. he’s not proud of some of the things he’s done to survive until the next day.

he meets woohyun one day in the dead of winter, when specks of white fly through the air before settling onto the ground and turning shades of brown from the dirt. he’s just minding his own business then, crouching down and warming his hands in the doorway of a closed-down store, when he hears the crunching footsteps of someone approaching. he doesn’t give it any notice at all—it’s probably some other person just like him, some other person who isn’t smart enough to avoid the cold. but then the footsteps stop right next to his enclave, and he looks up.

there’s a blond man there staring down at him, and sunggyu revises his earlier assessment. he’s not like sunggyu in the slightest, not at all. the fitted clothes he’s wearing, the thick coat he has on his shoulders, the leather boots on his feet: they all reek of money, something sunggyu hasn’t seen much of in the past fifteen years. 

the man bends down, folding his hands behind his back. there’s a smile on the man’s face that makes sunggyu shiver, and it’s not because of the cold. “someone with hands as pretty as yours shouldn’t be out here in the cold alone. how about you come home with me and show me what those hands can do?” 

sunggyu blinks up at him, because whatever he’d expected, a proposition hadn’t been one of them. he stands up slowly, dusting some of the snow off of his pants, and straightens up. he’s eye level with the man even though he’s wearing just some ratty sneakers he’d found some years ago, and that lends some bit of confidence to his next words. 

“pretty hands?” sunggyu echoes, half disbelieving and half mocking. he’s been through more than this guy could possibly know, seen more happen than this guy probably has. he balls up his fist and slams it into the wall next to him, and pain blooms in his hand, radiating outward down his arm and into his body. but it doesn’t really hurt anymore, not when he’s so cold his hand is already numb. he raises his fist up, uncurling his fingers in front of his face, and he watches the way blood drips down from his knuckles and down his wrist, and finally, onto the snow below, dotting it bright red.

the man stares at him, then at his hand, then back at him, and sunggyu wonders when the man’s going to turn tail and run already. instead, the man takes one, two steps forward, and before sunggyu can react, he has sunggyu’s wrist in one hand. he tips sunggyu’s chin forward with his other hand, his fingers curling around sunggyu’s jaw, and he says, “your hands were pretty before, but they’re even prettier now.” 

sunggyu stares back at him, stares back at the challenge in his eyes, and he knows he can’t back down now.

he finds out that the guy’s name is woohyun when they’re greeted at the door by other men in suits. “sir,” they call him, deferring to him, and sunggyu wonders just what kind of person woohyun is. he’d been pushed into the back of a car with tinted windows to get here, and he spends more time than he really has to looking around at the house he’s in now. it’s lavish, but not ostentatiously so, and woohyun drags sunggyu up the stairs and into one of the rooms.

he doesn’t have time to look around before he’s pushed back onto the bed and woohyun’s on him, pressing him down into the blankets. he’s all too aware of the fact that he’s probably staining these white sheets with black and brown and red, but he doesn’t care, not when he’s more preoccupied with meeting woohyun with everything he’s got. he winds his fingers through woohyun’s hair, tugging at the bleached blond strands, and he smiles against woohyun’s lips when he hears woohyun groan. 

woohyun tugs down sunggyu’s pants, pulling them down his hips and tossing them onto the ground. he leans over and pulls sunggyu’s shirt over his head, discarding it to the side when it comes off sunggyu’s wrists. now that he’s warmer, the pain in his hand is blooming again, and sunggyu thinks that maybe he shouldn’t have hit the wall so hard. 

“stop thinking,” woohyun murmurs against sunggyu’s lips, biting down on his lower lip in a way that’s more than just friendly, and sunggyu does when woohyun presses two fingers to sunggyu’s lips, and he can taste his own blood on woohyun’s fingers when he licks at them.

it burns when woohyun presses his fingers to sunggyu’s entrance, but he grits his teeth and buries his fingers into woohyun’s hair and drags him closer, crushing their lips together. sunggyu nearly bites off woohyun’s tongue when woohyun crooks his fingers inside, and just the feeling of woohyun laughing into his mouth is enough to make sunggyu want to push woohyun off.

so he does. sunggyu hasn’t protected himself for fifteen years not to be able to throw someone off of him, and he relishes the surprise in woohyun’s eyes when he lands on his back, his eyes wide and his mouth slack. woohyun still has most of his clothes on, sunggyu notes with some dismay, but it disappears when he sees how woohyun is straining against the zip of his jeans. he smiles, crooked, down at woohyun before he unzips woohyun’s jeans and sinks down onto woohyun’s hips in one fluid motion, and the groan woohyun lets out, low and long, is music to sunggyu’s ears.

sunggyu gets used to it. he learns that woohyun’s inherited the family business, except that the family business is the ownership of a gang controlling nearly a third of the outskirts of seoul and that woohyun only came into power when the previous leader, his father, was killed. sunggyu watches the way woohyun treats each new acquisition like a game that he’s desperate to win, watches the way woohyun plays each card in his hand with a nearly detached precision. 

some nights, woohyun comes to him with an exuberant grin on his face, one that tells sunggyu that he’s won. sunggyu doesn’t know if it’s a turf war that he’s come out on top of, or if he’s managed to take out the leaders of rival gangs, or anything at all, really. all he knows is the way woohyun licks down the column of his neck and and the way woohyun nips at the junction of his shoulder softly, not hard enough to draw blood, and the way woohyun exhales against his cheek when he bottoms out with sunggyu’s legs tight around his waist. 

those are the nights sunggyu treasures, keeping in his heart the memories that he has of woohyun’s hair glinting in the moonlight, the lights from outside making each strand shine like the stars. those are the nights woohyun lets sunggyu pull him close and tug his head against his chest, and sunggyu knows that even if in the morning he’ll give woohyun the same biting retorts he always does, none of that matters here, when the only thing sunggyu cares about is how young woohyun looks for someone who’s seen so much death already, and how much sunggyu wants to see his face as free of worry as he is in sleep. 

some nights, woohyun comes to him with his lips pressed thin and a hard set in his eyes, and sunggyu knows that these are the bad nights. he doesn’t know how many men they’ve lost, or how many families woohyun is going to need to call, or how many people woohyun is going to need to bury in the morning. all he knows is the way woohyun shoves his face into the pillow and the way woohyun’s fingers dig into his hips with a roughness that means there’ll be bruises the next morning and the way woohyun bites hard into sunggyu’s shoulders, making the sheets below bloom with red. woohyun leaves after he’s done, and it always takes sunggyu a few minutes to catch his breath before he can pull himself back together.

those are the nights sunggyu hates. they’re a reminder that woohyun lives in a world where every day could mean the difference between life and death, and that woohyun has come so close to being on the other side of a bullet before as well. there are scars on woohyun’s chest, white and raised now, that only remind sunggyu of that because they’d once been red and angry before. those are the nights that sunggyu lies awake after tugging the sheets back around him and wonders, once he’s served his purpose like everyone else woohyun associates with, if woohyun’s going to be done with him as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> inspired by a mixture of bad/back *__* hmu on twitter if you wanna scream at me...!!!! (but sunggyu's hands are seriously so pretty........)


	5. the chaser

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where [woohyun](http://cfile2.uf.tistory.com/image/211CBD3B57D523F00DF54B) is a prefect and sunggyu is the head boy with a stick up his ass | e | 1442

woohyun sneezes when he ascends the stairs up to the great hall. the dungeons are always musty this time of year, and he has no idea what kind of things could be floating around in the air around them. he wipes his nose on the sleeve of his robes, sniffling, and he casts sungyeol a dirty look when the gryffindor snickers under his breath.

“what?” woohyun barks, probably a bit harsher than he’d intended. he would feel bad, but he knows sungyeol doesn’t mind, not when he punches woohyun in the shoulder, still laughing, and walks over to his own table at the other end of the great hall. woohyun takes a seat at his own table, their green and silver decorations hanging from the ceiling above them.

sungjong wordlessly passes him a plate, and woohyun piles it high with steak and potatoes. “i’m starving,” woohyun complains before he shoves a forkful of food into his mouth. he doesn’t swallow before he’s saying, around a mouth full of meat, “could use more salt.”

sungjong gives him a withering look. “hyung,” sungjong starts, and woohyun knows by the look on his face and the tone in his voice that it’s not going to be anything particularly positive. “close your mouth when you eat, it’s really distracting and disgusting. oh, and by the way, you have a really long line of snot coming out of your nose, it goes all the way to your chin. just thought you might want to know.”

_fuck._

that must’ve been what sungyeol had been laughing so hard about earlier. woohyun nearly tips over a glass of water in his haste to cast a quick charm on himself to clean his face off, and he makes eye contact with sungyeol all the way across the hall. sungyeol grins at him, wide and beatific, before raising his glass of cranberry juice and toasting, and howon leans over from where he’d been sitting next to sungyeol and imitates a line of snot trailing from his nose to his mouth.

woohyun can feel his eye twitching. he’s going to get them both in the gryffindor-slytherin quidditch match next week, he swears. howon isn’t that good of a beater and sungyeol isn’t that good of a keeper, anyway. he longs for the day he can put the gryffindors in their place, once and for all, and as if they can hear what he’s thinking about, the two of them laugh again, and woohyun flips them both his middle finger, raising it high enough in the air that he’s certain they can all see him.

then there’s an abrupt noise next to him, a swish of robes, and then sunggyu’s leaning down over the bench and staring into woohyun’s eyes. “i really expected better of you, since you’re a prefect. try not to do anything inappropriate that all the professors can see next time, hmm?” sunggyu says conversationally, like he’s talking about the weather. the head boy straightens up, folding his hands behind his back. “ten points from slytherin,” he says, before he walks the short distance back to the ravenclaw table.

woohyun stares at his retreating back, his mouth agape, before he turns back to sungjong. “did you _see_  that?” he hisses under his breath, stabbing his fork back into his potatoes. “who does he think he is? _ten points_?”

sungjong doesn’t respond, so woohyun reaches over and pinches the other boy’s arm until he yelps and slaps woohyun’s hand away. sungjong rubs at the reddening mark on his forearm, pursing his lips together.

“yeah, i think we all saw that. he’s the head boy, hyung, he can do whatever you want. ow, why did you pinch me so hard?” sungjong whines, and then he adds, like it’s an afterthought, which it clearly isn’t, “he has a point, though. you _are_  super inappropriate all the time, especially for a prefect.”

“whatever,” woohyun snorts. he doesn’t have time for sungjong’s snark right now. making as much of an effort to visibly ignore sungjong as he can, he shovels the rest of his plate into his mouth before he stands up, putting his glass of water onto his plate and bringing it over to the house elves. he has potions with the hufflepuffs to study for next period, and he’ll be damned if he’s going to let sunggyu distract him any more than he already does.

except he can’t stop thinking about the curve of sunggyu’s mouth and the press of sunggyu’s fingers on his arm during class, and he accidentally drops an entire stinkweed root into the cauldron, making his entire concoction overflow onto his robes. the professor gives him a thin frown over myungsoo’s head, and woohyun shrugs before he mutters a quick charm to get rid of all the overflowing liquid. miraculously, he manages to come up with the correct antidote in the end, and the professor tells him he’s lucky to be able to squeeze his way out of everything before he’s dashing up the stairs.

there’s a secret passageway up to the prefects’ bathroom. it’s tucked behind all the hallways that the students use on their daily treks to and from class, and woohyun’s thankful for the lack of traffic when he presses his hand to a brick in the wall. it’s been charmed to only recognize the head boy and girl and the rest of the prefects, and woohyun knows it’s a bit elitist, but he doesn’t really care. the door materializes in front of him, and he steps inside. there’s just one person inside right now, and woohyun can’t help the way he grins when he sees just who it is.

“you stink,” sunggyu says without looking up from his book. woohyun steps closer, shrugging off his robes and draping them over a bench, before he sits down next to sunggyu and lays his head on the head boy’s shoulder. sunggyu marks his page and puts his book up on a ledge behind them before he shoves at woohyun’s thigh. “seriously, you smell so bad. what did you do earlier?”

“stinkweed,” woohyun says shortly, scooting closer to sunggyu until they’re pressed together from shoulder to hip. he breathes in, the smells of lavender and chamomile from the bath soaps mixing with the way sunggyu smells like cotton blossoms, sharp and musky. “by the way, why do you keep taking points off of my house? it hurts. so much.”

sunggyu looks down at woohyun’s pout, an unimpressed expression on his face. “you really expect to flip howon and sungyeol off in front of all of the professors and students and _not_  get any punishment for it? just be grateful i didn’t take off more.”

“what if i show you something more inappropriate? would you take off points then?” woohyun asks benignly, reaching downwards to slip his hand under sunggyu’s robes, and he knows, by the way sunggyu’s eyes drift down to his lips, that he’s won.

sunggyu hates it when they do it in the water, which woohyun doesn’t understand. he never will, not when sunggyu’s so pliant and open in front of him, his legs tightening around woohyun’s waist and his arms looped around woohyun’s neck. he’d cast some charms to give them some semblance of privacy, and the air is nearly completely white with steam now, rising up from the water around them.

he’s close, he knows it. he’s always been weak to the way sunggyu bites his lips to stop himself from making too much noise, to the way sunggyu scrunches his eyes closed when it’s too much. woohyun decides, then, that it’s now or never. he pulls out just slightly, just enough that he doesn’t think sunggyu notices, and when he comes, he comes all over sunggyu’s stomach, white streaks splattering onto the soft skin of his stomach.

sunggyu’s eyes shoot open almost immediately, and he glances down at the mess on his stomach before staring back up at woohyun, his eyes wide. woohyun braces himself for a stern lecture or some loud admonishments, but they never come. instead, sunggyu gets up and cleans himself off before he starts putting his clothes back on, and woohyun follows suit.

they step out of the bathroom and woohyun’s about to turn around and lean close and hug sunggyu goodbye before they take off on their separate ways. he has to head down to the dungeons where his house commons are, and he knows sunggyu's going up to the towers. then woohyun realizes he’s not quite out of the woods when sunggyu steps forward first and, so quietly woohyun almost doesn’t hear it, whispers, “fifty points from slytherin.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i love... stickler ravenclaw head boy sunggyu and rebellious slytherin prefect woohyun 8_8 hmu with your headcanons for the others, i'd love to hear them if you have any~ happy new year's eve!


	6. moonlight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where sunggyu has always followed orders and woohyun is the one he’ll disobey them for | e | 1197

the palace is dark and still when sunggyu makes his way through the winding hallways, slipping through the twists and turns like he could navigate it blind. he most likely could, having been raised in the palace as the son of one of the king’s most senior advisers, but he’d rather not have to find out. he pushes open the door at the end of the hallway that leads to the courtyard, and there, he finds what he’s been looking for.

sunggyu settles into the cushions, folding his legs underneath him and watching the solitary figure in the middle of the courtyard. there’s a pond there, bracketed with small rocks on its perimeter, and on the other side of the garden is a dense grove of trees. he can just barely make out the silvery silhouette of the moon dancing across the surface of the pond, but that’s not why he’s here. he waits, his fingers tapping an idle pattern against his thighs. 

sunggyu must have made some some sort of sound, or something in the air around them must have shifted, because the other man looks over at him, suddenly and abruptly, and sunggyu catches a glimmer of recognition in his eyes before he drops his tools and he bows, low, and says, “good evening, my lord.” 

“good evening, woohyun,” sunggyu says, inclining his head, and he watches as woohyun straightens up, his hands moving to fold behind his back. woohyun’s eyes dart back toward the array of rocks he’d been removing and placing on the side for another day, and sunggyu knows he has work to do. “will you join me after your task is completed?” 

“i would be honored, my lord.” woohyun bows again before he goes to kneel at the water’s edge. sunggyu watches the way his hair, so dark in the sunlight, shines in the moonlight, and he wonders how he could ever have been so blind. 

he’d been told from childhood to pay no attention to the slave in the gardens. he’d been told that the slave’s father was a traitor against the nation and that that meant the slave himself was marked, destined to lead a life of menial labor. sunggyu had asked, once and once only, what that slave’s name was and how old he was, since he seemed to be so much younger than sunggyu himself was, and he’d been patted on the head and told, in a sickeningly sweet voice, that slaves had neither names nor ages.

sunggyu had believed it. he’d believed it, walking past that courtyard every day and not paying the slave any notice, up until the day he’d seen him collapse, the hot summer sun beating down on him. sunggyu had hesitated for a second before he’d realized he had to do something, anything, and he’d dragged the man into the shade and given him water until he woke up. when his eyes fluttered open, the slave had jumped up so quickly it was as if he’d been burned, and sunggyu had stared up at him and reassured him that everything would be alright.

sunggyu startles when a weight settles next to him, but relaxes when he realizes it’s just woohyun. woohyun’s watching him, his eyes wide despite the dirt on his face and on his hands. sunggyu picks up the plate of fruit he’d taken from the kitchens on his way here and offers woohyun a cherry, and he looks up just briefly before he ducks down and takes the cherry into his mouth. 

when the plate of fruit is nearly empty, sunggyu becomes hyperaware that the sounds of their breathing are heavier now, that his hands are sweatier now than before, and that woohyun seems to be closer now than he was, his eyes bright in the darkness. sunggyu swallows, and he knows he’s not imagining the way woohyun’s eyes watch the movement of his throat before flicking back up to his face.

sunggyu takes another cherry in his fingers, the last one, and he presses it to woohyun’s lips, not knowing why he’s suddenly so tense. woohyun bites down on the cherry, and when the juice runs down sunggyu’s hand, he leans forward and licks the juice off, his tongue lapping at sunggyu’s fingers, his eyes not wavering from where he’s been holding sunggyu’s gaze.

sunggyu swallows again, and he knows woohyun hears it. there’s no way he doesn’t, not when it seems like they’re the only two awake, not when it seems like the entire world is silent and still around them. woohyun follows when sunggyu takes his wrist, circling it with his fingers, and leads him across the garden, their steps crunching in the grass, and behind the grove of trees. 

he looks at woohyun, searching his face for resistance, before he unties his jeogori and spreads it on the grass beneath him. “please,” sunggyu whispers, and that’s all that woohyun seems to need.

sunggyu doesn’t think he can ever tire of this, of seeing woohyun above him with his sweat-slick hair clinging to his face, of having his legs drawn up above woohyun’s shoulders with woohyun’s fingers pressing marks into his skin he knows will be bruises tomorrow, of having woohyun in him, so deep and so full, and making every nerve ending in his body feel like they’re on fire. 

it’s not like the first time they’d done this, when sunggyu had watched the way sweat dropped down woohyun’s chest and onto the grass below and he’d beckoned woohyun over. woohyun had fucked him there, behind the trees, and the only sounds they’d made were their harsh gasps, fast and frantic and shuddering. but then it had been a pain to clean up when the entire palace was still bustling around them, so sunggyu had smiled, shy and small, at woohyun and said that maybe they should meet at night, and woohyun had nodded and said that sunggyu was right.

now, woohyun takes his time, careful, and his eyes roam over sunggyu’s body with a curious, exploratory look. sunggyu has to stop himself from covering himself, especially since he knows that he’s been caught watching the play of the shadows across woohyun’s arms and chest. woohyun’s fingers trail down sunggyu’s neck and over his nipples and brush over his stomach, until he takes sunggyu in hand, and it’s all sunggyu can do not to gasp. then woohyun smiles, fond, down at him, and then sunggyu knows that he can make whatever sounds he wants to around him.

he can do whatever he want, as long as it’s underneath the cover of darkness and the light of the moon, as long as he’s with woohyun.

(sunggyu doesn’t think about how he’ll be married to someone to advance his social standing soon, about how he’ll have to live with someone he doesn’t love, about how his future as he knows it isn’t quite his own. he doesn’t think about how uncertain woohyun’s life really is, hanging in the delicate balance of court politics, and he wishes he could do something about it to make sure woohyun won’t have to suffer any more. for now, he lets himself dream.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok so i highkey love historical aus........ give me all the sageuks


	7. entrust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where sunggyu hates people who are dumber than he is and people who are smarter than he is, and woohyun is the one he hates the most | g | 1362

15:32 gyugyu: i hate him  
15:33 gyugyu: i hate him so much  
15:33 gyugyu: i literally don’t think you understand  
15:34 gyugyu: how much i hate him omfg  
15:35 jjangdong: who? *v*  
15:35 jjangdong: haha dont be mean  
15:35 jjangdong: im sure hes nice!!!  
15:36 gyugyu: do you know him  
15:36 gyugyu: his name is nam woohyun  
15:36 gyugyu: i think he’s a first year?  
15:36 gyugyu: ugh  
15:40 jjangdong: i kno him!!!! *_*  
15:41 jjangdong: ahahaha  
15:41 jjangdong: hes so nice  
15:41 jjangdong: hes a good kid  
15:42 gyugyu: you’re lying  
15:42 gyugyu: he’s an annoying piece of crap  
15:42 gyugyu: he literally  
15:42 gyugyu: my blood pressure is rising right now  
15:42 gyugyu: he literally corrected me  
15:42 gyugyu: in front of the teacher  
15:42 gyugyu: since apparently he tested out of like  
15:43 gyugyu: every single first year math class  
15:43 gyugyu: and every single second year math class  
15:44 gyugyu: omfg i’m so mad right now  
15:46 jjangdong: :(  
15:46 jjangdong: hes a good kid!!!!!  
15:46 jjangdong: rly!!!!!!!!  
15:46 jjangdong: we play futsal together sometimes  
15:46 jjangdong: since hes on the team  
15:46 jjangdong: and he plays basketball sometimes too  
15:48 gyugyu: omfg  
15:48 gyugyu: this is even worse  
15:48 gyugyu: he plays a sport??  
15:48 gyugyu: oh my god  
15:48 gyugyu: i hate him  
15:48 gyugyu: i hate him soooooo much  
15:48 jjangdong: why do u hate him??? T__T  
15:50 gyugyu: because he’s annoying  
15:50 gyugyu: an asshat  
15:50 gyugyu: incapable of learning his place  
15:50 gyugyu: takes too damn long to write on the board  
15:50 gyugyu: i’m really really really sure  
15:51 gyugyu: that there are more reasons  
15:51 gyugyu: but i really can’t think of them right now  
15:51 gyugyu: his stupid face ugh  
15:51 gyugyu: ughhhhhhhh  
15:53 jjangdong: awwwwhhhh  
15:53 jjangdong: i think hes a good kid for real  
15:53 jjangdong: just watch!!! :D

20:17 gyugyu: ummmmmmm  
20:17 gyugyu: dongwoo  
20:17 gyugyu: i need your help  
20:17 gyugyu: like right now  
20:20 gyugyu: where are you omg  
20:20 gyugyu: jang dongwoo  
20:21 jjangdong: im hereeeeeee  
20:21 jjangdong: whats up???  
20:21 gyugyu: omfg  
20:21 gyugyu: that guy  
20:21 gyugyu: that stupid guy  
20:21 gyugyu: that stupid nam woohyun  
20:21 gyugyu: he just gave me a doughnut  
20:22 gyugyu: earlier in class today  
20:22 gyugyu: what does this mean??????  
20:23 jjangdong: maybe he likes u kkk  
20:23 jjangdong: haha just kidding!!!!  
20:23 jjangdong: i told u hes a rly good guy hehe  
20:23 jjangdong: hes sooo nice  
20:24 jjangdong: like one time  
20:24 jjangdong: we were playing out on the field right?  
20:24 jjangdong: and then like a ball accidentally hit a dog  
20:24 jjangdong: and i think it was a stray dog  
20:25 jjangdong: and he took it home  
20:25 jjangdong: and he took care of it  
20:25 jjangdong: and he nursed it back to health  
20:25 jjangdong: isnt that super sweet  
20:26 jjangdong: :(  
20:26 jjangdong: give him a chance  
20:26 jjangdong: hes a rly rly rly nice guy!!!  
20:27 jjangdong: im telling u  
20:28 gyugyu: why can’t you let me hate him in peace  
20:28 gyugyu: like seriously  
20:29 jjangdong: i just want my friends to be friends  
20:29 jjangdong: everyone should just be friends  
20:29 jjangdong: with each otherrrrr  
20:30 jjangdong: hey sunggyu-hyung  
20:30 jjangdong: maybe do u wanna  
20:30 jjangdong: come watch a game sometime  
20:31 jjangdong: :D?  
20:31 jjangdong: itll be really fun i promise  
20:32 gyugyu: no i hate being outside  
20:32 gyugyu: i hate games  
20:32 gyugyu: i hate grass  
20:32 gyugyu: i hate the other schools around here  
20:32 gyugyu: but most of all  
20:32 gyugyu: most!  
20:33 gyugyu: of!  
20:33 gyugyu: all!  
20:33 gyugyu: i hate nam woohyun  
20:35 jjangdong: ok  
20:35 jjangdong: ok… sure

22:43 gyugyu: i will never go to any games again  
22:43 gyugyu: omfg  
22:43 gyugyu: tell everyone you know  
22:44 gyugyu: starting the next semester  
22:44 gyugyu: all sports teams will be defunded  
22:44 gyugyu: for good  
22:45 gyugyu: this is an order from the student body president  
22:45 gyugyu: aka me  
22:45 gyugyu: kim sunggyu  
22:46 jjangdong: omg whyyy  
22:46 jjangdong: what about me  
22:46 jjangdong: sunggyu-hyunngggggg  
22:46 jjangdong: :(  
22:47 gyugyu: oh i guess you’re fine  
22:47 gyugyu: your team can live  
22:49 jjangdong: what abt umm  
22:49 jjangdong: lets see  
22:49 jjangdong: archery  
22:49 gyugyu: why would i care about archery  
22:50 jjangdong: doesnt myungsoo do archery at middle school  
22:51 gyugyu: …..  
22:51 gyugyu: ……..  
22:51 gyugyu: …………….  
22:51 gyugyu: ……………………….  
22:52 gyugyu: oh yeah he does lol  
22:52 gyugyu: i guess i have to save archery too  
22:52 gyugyu: whatever  
22:52 gyugyu: i’ll only defund futsal next semester  
22:52 gyugyu: never mind  
22:53 jjangdong: why futsal  
22:53 jjangdong: ???? :(  
22:54 gyugyu: isn’t it obvious  
22:54 gyugyu: because of that person  
22:54 gyugyu: omfg  
22:55 jjangdong: ahh  
22:55 jjangdong: woohyunie  
22:57 gyugyu: yeah  
22:57 gyugyu: stupid nam woohyun  
22:57 gyugyu: embarrassing me in front of the school like that  
22:57 gyugyu: the nerve  
22:57 gyugyu: i am so embarrassed  
22:59 jjangdong: hyung  
22:59 jjangdong: i think most ppl would like it tho  
22:59 jjangdong: having the star striker give a shout out  
22:59 jjangdong: and after the winning goal too  
23:00 jjangdong: ooooh  
23:00 jjangdong: i think he might like you  
23:01 gyugyu: no you’re lying  
23:01 gyugyu: no there’s no way  
23:01 gyugyu: never  
23:01 gyugyu: never ever  
23:01 gyugyu: never ever ever  
23:01 gyugyu: in your dreams  
23:02 jjangdong: im not lying!!!!  
23:02 jjangdong: i think he rly likes u!!!!!!!  
23:03 gyugyu: jang dongwoo  
23:03 gyugyu: this is an order  
23:03 gyugyu: please  
23:03 gyugyu: stop talking  
23:04 jjangdong: i rly think so tho :3  
23:04 jjangdong: hehe :3  
23:06 gyugyu: ugh

16:02 gyugyu: um  
16:03 gyugyu: jang dongwoo  
16:03 gyugyu: nam woohyun?????????????????  
16:03 gyugyu: he just asked me out for ice cream??????????????  
16:03 gyugyu: omfg what does this mean?????????????????????  
16:04 gyugyu: what do i say  
16:04 gyugyu: do you think he wants to poison me  
16:04 gyugyu: maybe he wants to take over my position  
16:05 gyugyu: maybe he wants to be student body president too  
16:05 gyugyu: dongwoo  
16:05 gyugyu: what if he’s planning to abduct me  
16:05 gyugyu: and steal my identity?????  
16:05 gyugyu: jang dongwoo  
16:06 gyugyu: jang dongwoooooo  
16:06 gyugyu: why aren’t you responding to me  
16:06 gyugyu: jang  
16:07 gyugyu: dong  
16:07 gyugyu: woo  
16:07 gyugyu: what should i do  
16:10 gyugyu: please respond  
16:10 gyugyu: please  
16:11 gyugyu: i am dying  
16:11 gyugyu: as we speak  
16:15 jjangdong: hyung just do us all a favor please  
16:15 jjangdong: and just go out with him  
16:15 gyugyu: omfg what do you mean go out with him  
16:15 gyugyu: what??????  
16:16 gyugyu: what going out??????  
16:16 gyugyu: there is no going out????????  
16:17 gyugyu: oh my god  
16:17 gyugyu: the entire world is against me  
16:17 gyugyu: everyone hates me  
16:17 gyugyu: especially nam woohyun  
16:18 gyugyu: ugh  
16:18 gyugyu: fine  
16:18 gyugyu: i guess i’ll go  
16:18 gyugyu: but only because i’m being forced to

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so...!!! that's the end of this but spoiler alert they end up together and woohyun annoys sunggyu every single day for the rest of their lives heh (btw thank you for 10k hits!!!!! ^__^ )


	8. be mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where woohyun has a problem and sunggyu is ninety-nine percent of it | g | 1005

woohyun stares out of the window. the entire house is quiet, save for his soft breaths and for the subtle movements that the only other person in the room is making. woohyun resists the urge to look over, instead opting to continue watching the way the clouds are slowly drifting by in the sky above. he hears a soft and small sneeze, and, once again, resists the urge to look over.

woohyun is a dog, after all. and dogs, even if they are just hybrids, are known for their patience and obedience.

and then he hears another soft sneeze, and woohyun’s head whips around to the source of the sound. he meets another pair of dark eyes straight on, and woohyun only watches as sunggyu sits up from where he’d been lying on the couch to stand up and stretch his legs. there’s just the faintest hint of lavender and chamomile when sunggyu brushes past him and disappears into the bedroom.

woohyun watches as the tip of sunggyu’s tail disappears into the room, and he turns back around with a loud sigh. it’s been ten days since sunggyu came here, but he hasn’t spoken a single word to woohyun still. woohyun’s ears twitch nervously. he doesn’t know if sunggyu is always this quiet, or if he just hates woohyun. 

they’re all escapees from the hybrid trade here. all woohyun knows about the history of this is that it had been a government program meant to create workers of the highest ability— those who could do incredible amounts of manual labor, those who would be suited for manufacturing jobs, those who would be suited for the type of work typically hidden behind silk curtains. 

it’s easy to tell by the kind of animal their genes have been spliced with what their inteded jobs were supposed to be. myungsoo is thin and delicate, his ears and tail almost unbearably soft to the touch, and woohyun knows that from the few times he’s grabbed myungsoo by the wrist, that myungsoo’s skin is even softer. howon is built, his body thick and wiry with muscle, and woohyun still sees him working out whenever he has free time. they have a lot of free time nowadays, since they have nothing else to do.

there are others here: there’s dongwoo, whose tail never stops moving around, and sometimes, woohyun swears that it has a mind of its own since it never seens to not be able to smack him directly in the face. there’s sungjong, who’s tall and pretty, and woohyun doesn’t ask him about why he’s always so nervous around certain areas of the city. there’s sungyeol, who’s lithe and muscled, with the strength that woohyun knows comes from years of work.

woohyun himself had decided, years ago, to escape the boring monotony of working in an assembly line for the rest of his life. he knows that what had been his life before he’d decided to get out had been nothing compared to what had happened to some of the others, but he’s decided to put it behind him. he’d decided, when he’d found the address and the phone number for the shelter. 

it’s something that most of them had taken to heart as soon as they stepped through the gates. trying to figure out how to navigate his newfound freedom had been startling at first for woohyun, but he’d quickly gotten used to it. after all, it had been fun to go around with howon and sungyeol to explore the city, not as hybrids with collars around their necks tying them down to their obligations and to their responsibilities, but on their own.

but it’s been a full ten days since sunggyu first stepped through the gates, and woohyun can’t stop looking at him. he’s just a little bit taller than woohyun himself is, and his ears are pointed, black and sticking straight up from his head, instead of drooping down like woohyun’s do. it’s not that sunggyu doesn’t speak or move, either; woohyun’s seen him curling his tail around myungsoo’s on more than one occasion— woohyun’s even seen sunggyu laughing broadly with sungjong. 

and, well, woohyun would be lying if he said he didn’t like the way sunggyu’s laugh is probably one of the prettiest he’s ever heard, second to only his own. 

it’s on the twelfth day that woohyun decides that something has to happen, and that he’ll do it all himself if something doesn’t change soon. the others are all out somewhere, exploring or trying to look for jobs or relaxing, but woohyun’s cooped up inside. he stares mournfully out of the window, yearning to be outside, but he knows he can’t. sunggyu is inside, after all, and he prefers to be inside where it’s not dirty and loud. woohyun’s tail starts padding impatiently against the ground the way it always does whenever he doesn’t have anything else to do.

woohyun finds sunggyu napping in a circle of sunlight in the living room. he knows, by the way that sunggyu’s ears twitch just slightly when woohyun steps into the room, that he’s been noticed. 

“i’m woohyun,” he says, swallowing thickly. 

“i know,” sunggyu says without looking up at all, and woohyun blinks. because sunggyu’s voice is nicer than he’d thought. he has a unique voice, throaty and full. 

“i wanted to say hi to you,” woohyun says, lamely, still staring down at the figure curled up on the ground.

“i know.” 

“then why didn’t you say anything first?” woohyun asks, stepping just a bit closer until he’s almost next to sunggyu.

sunggyu’s ears twitch and his tail wraps around his thigh, and he cracks an eye open at woohyun, and woohyun doesn’t know if he’s imagining the way his eye crinkles or not. and then, as sunggyu leans just that bit upward and smiles up at woohyun with his eyes folding into half moons, and says, “because i was waiting for you to make the first move,” woohyun knows that he’s well and truly fucked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy birthday goober!!!!! ^___^


	9. breathe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where woohyun needs some company and sunggyu's there to give it to him | g | 1205

sunggyu is waiting when woohyun pulls up by the curb. he doesn’t say anything even after he’s safely tucked into the passenger seat, buckling his seat belt in and adjusting his seat so that he’s comfortable. he sits there, placing his hands into his lap and looking over at woohyun, like he’s waiting for woohyun to make the first move.

“were you waiting long?” woohyun asks finally after he’s started the car, his hands relaxed on the steering wheel. he hopes that he looks more confident than he feels, hopes that sunggyu doesn’t notice just how sweaty his palms have become.

“not at all,” sunggyu says, and his voice is strangely alluring, deep and soft, and woohyun gulps. “i hope the drive over wasn’t too packed.”

“it wasn’t,” woohyun says, and he realizes that his voice sounds strained and all too high, even to him. the drive really was terrible, and woohyun hates driving downtown during rush hour for this very reason. but it’ll be worth it tonight. “it was— it was fine.”

a peaceful silence settles over them, and woohyun’s trying to keep his eyes fixed on the road in front of him, but he realizes that he can’t keep his eyes from drifting over to sunggyu. he hadn’t noticed it before, but sunggyu’s dressed to the nines for today. his hair is neatly styled back in a way that makes it look like he’s just run his fingers through it, and woohyun doesn’t want to let his mind wander off to what sunggyu must be wearing underneath the suit jacket.

he does notice the way sunggyu’s gaze is fixed somewhere into the distance. he’s looking out of the window, his arm resting lightly against the door. he wonders if sunggyu likes the way the city lights of seoul sparkle in the darkness, if he wants to be somewhere else than here.

“is something wrong?” woohyun asks, coming to a slow stop before he shuts off the engine, and sunggyu jerks like he’s just noticed woohyun’s presence. he blinks, his eyelashes casting long shadows on his cheeks. “we’re here.”

sunggyu blinks up at woohyun again after woohyun makes his way around the car to the other side so he can open the door. “of course,” sunggyu says, and when he unfolds himself from the seat and stands, woohyun realizes, with a very strange of vertigo, that the sunggyu he’s looking at now isn’t the same sunggyu he’d been sneaking glances at during the car ride.

there’s not a single ounce of hesitation in his gaze now, and he wears the clothes woohyun had asked him to wear with confidence. he leans into woohyun’s side as they walk towards the hotel, to the place where woohyun has an office party tonight. woohyun doesn’t even really want to go— he’s being forced into it by his project partners, and besides, he knows it’ll be a good chance to network with representatives from other companies.

sunggyu stays by woohyun’s side the entire night, sticking close to him like a shadow, his warmth strangely comforting. his hand curls around woohyun’s elbow as they make their way through the crowd, and woohyun has to stop himself from looking at sunggyu too often, from staring at the shape of sunggyu’s lips, from wanting to reach out and tug sunggyu more closely to him.

howon comes by with a flute of champagne in one hand and a plate of appetizers in the other, and woohyun can see the exact split second he decides not to make the jab at woohyun that he’d been meaning to ever since they both got off of work hours ago. “who’s this?” he asks instead, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and staring at sunggyu with barely-concealed curiosity in his eyes.

woohyun’s about to answer for sunggyu before he realizes that he’s going to give sunggyu a chance to speak, so he nudges him just slightly in the side. sunggyu starts, dislodging himself from woohyun’s side so he can reach out for howon’s hand, and woohyun watches their handshake with no small amount of interest. howon’s known for having a strong handshake that he uses to throw people off, and woohyun can tell by the way howon’s eyebrows raise in— amazement? surprise? admiration? all of the above?— that sunggyu’s passed the test.

“i’m sunggyu,” he says, taking his hand back and putting it back onto woohyun’s arm. “i’m here with woohyun. it’s a nice party you guys have here tonight.”

the smile he gives howon is small and pretty and definitely doesn’t make woohyun’s heart leap in his chest.

“oh really?” howon’s eyes narrow at woohyun. “don’t you think you shouldn’t be seen with someone like him? he’s a gnome.”

“no, he’s really nice—” sunggyu starts, and woohyun can’t listen to this anymore.

“like you’re one to talk, you gremlin,” woohyun snaps, and sunggyu’s laughter is bright yet loud at the same time, full-bodied in a way that makes his entire body shudder. woohyun has to drag sunggyu away so that the tendrils of what are, of course, not jealousy, don’t rise up in his throat again.

at the end of the night, woohyun drops sunggyu back off at his place, waving him off and watching until he disappears into the hallway before he heads back to his own apartment on the outskirts of seoul. when he gets home, he notices that he has a message blinking on his phone screen. it’s from howon.

_sunggyu, huh? do you want to explain why i haven’t seen him before? or are you going to keep sticking with your story of having a boyfriend from overseas? i’m not that dumb, okay?_

woohyun tosses his phone down on the couch. he’d never even intended to try to fool howon— he knows that howon would pick up on it as a shark picks up the slightest smell of blood. he’d only meant this as a deterrent to keep the office receptionists from making bets about how seemingly lonely he is— he hadn’t even wanted to go in the first place, not when it would’ve been wildly inappropriate to bring one of his past hook-ups to the party, so when one of his other coworkers had given him a website address and some names to call, he’d gone there.

he’d needed to find someone who was quiet and well-spoken, someone who was good-looking and tall, someone who had a sharp sense of humor and an even sharper wit, and he’d found that someone in sunggyu. sunggyu had cost quite a bit to rent out for just a few hours, but it had been worth it.

he knows full well that sunggyu’s information on his page says specifically that he won’t do anything that’s more than kissing— and even that is for a price to be billed onto his flat rate. he knows full well that sunggyu has other clients that aren’t him, other customers who probably use him for the same purposes that woohyun’s just used him for. he knows full well that he’s just another line in sunggyu’s bank account, but for some reason— for some stupid and inane and nonsensical reason, he wants to see sunggyu again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here it is.... the escort au of my dreams lol ~_~ sorry about the hiatus, everyone, school is lowkey kicking my butt :-(


	10. the answer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where sunggyu thinks it's just another normal day, but woohyun has other plans | g | 1325

they say that there are only three constants in life: life, death, and taxes, but sunggyu thinks that there’s something else that won’t ever change. 

the second he turns his key in the lock when he gets home to his apartment on the furthest reaches of seoul, he hears an a crash from behind the door, then loud thuds. bracing himself, he pushes the door open, already fully aware of what’s going to happen once he shuts the door again.

woohyun tackles him back against the wall, his body nearly slamming into sunggyu’s, and it’s only his sheer force of will that keeps him upright. it doesn’t hurt, not really, since woohyun’s hands against sunggyu’s back help cushion the impact. it’s a touch as constant as anything could be, and sunggyu smiles without really meaning to. 

“hi!” woohyun says, and sunggyu can practically see his tail wagging behind him— it is. he reaches up to scratch behind woohyun’s ears, marveling at how soft and silky the fur feels beneath his fingers now. it’s a far cry from the state sunggyu had found him in, where woohyun’s entire body was nearly ruined, where his arms and legs were broken in multiple places and his ears and tail were matted down with blood. 

in sunggyu’s line of work, where he helps rescue hybrids from dangerous and life-threatening situations, things like these are common. sunggyu had known from the very moment that the hybrids were first put on the market, from the very moment they were advertised to be “like humans, but not quite,” that they would be exploited for reasons no sane human would ever consider. 

the dog hybrids, the ones like woohyun, are bred— genetically modified, sunggyu reminds himself— to be strong and have almost ridiculous amounts of muscle mass. they’re used mostly in construction sites and to reach places that would generally be considered too risky to send humans into. they’re apparently alright with using the dog hybrids to do their dirty work, though, and sunggyu hates them just that bit more. 

sunggyu had been the first one on the scene to respond to the reports of a freak accident at a construction site for a skyscraper, after all. he’d been the one to catalogue all of the deaths and to pull woohyun out from underneath the beams that had been pinning him down. he’d been there for hours, laying underneath the collapsed construction site where the higher-ups from his company had left him and his fellow workers to die, buried underneath the concrete and the dust. out of the nine that had been working on the site on that day, woohyun had been the only one that sunggyu had found alive.

it’s been nearly half a year since then, and woohyun is much better. he’s recovered from most of the trauma that he’d gone through before, and his arms and legs have completely healed. woohyun’s muscles, the ones that had served him so well in his construction work, had atrophied while he’d been lying in the hospital bed for days on end, but with physical therapy and sunggyu’s daily encouragement, woohyun’s gained most of his muscle mass and his drive to better himself back. 

sunggyu knows that it can’t be that easy, though. there’s no way. he knows that woohyun wakes up screaming from nightmares sometimes, no doubt thinking about all of the friends that he’d lost in the construction accident, but sunggyu hopes that he knows that he’s always there if woohyun ever wants to talk. sunggyu can relate— he’s lost so many of his fellow comrades in the force to completely preventable reasons, too. their squad isn’t one that’s easy to brave it out through, and he doesn’t blame people for leaving once all of the darkness they see starts to pile up.

there are the cat hybrids, the ones bred to be lithe and slender and /beautiful/, and while the dog hybrids are primarily used in construction and surveying, the cat hybrids are used in the seedier underground business. sunggyu wonders just how exactly using cat hybrids for sex can be legal, but he supposes that it’s legal in the way that using dog hybrids for wildly unsafe plans is— they’re not considered human. they’re not considered to have the same rights that humans do, even though most of their genome is the same as sunggyu’s and everyone else he knows who doesn’t have ears poking from the tops of their heads and a tail peeking out from their pants.

sunggyu shakes his head. he can’t spend too long thinking about this— not now, not today. he forces a smile on his face, one that becoes more natural the more he rubs the top of woohyun’s head. his hair really is soft. sunggyu thinks, with just a glimmer of jealousy, that even though they share all of the same shampoos and conditioners, woohyun’s hair is nicer than his. must be his genes.

“i missed you,” woohyun continues, burying his face into sunggyu’s neck and sniffing and breathing in, long and drawn-out. sunggyu absently pats woohyun’s back as woohyun drops a kiss onto sunggyu’s collarbone. he knows just why woohyun’s being clingier than usual today— he can see the trail of destruction woohyun’s made in the kitchen from here, and he sighs internally. 

“what were you doing?” sunggyu asks in as innocent of a tone as he can, pretending like he doesn’t know what woohyun could’ve been doing with flour and eggs and sugar. he feels woohyun tense, his muscles shifting against sunggyu’s body. 

“nothing,” woohyun mumbles, and he tries to angle his body so that sunggyu can’t see what’s happening in the kitchen. sunggyu’s already seen enough, though, and he’s not going to lie to himself— it really looks like a tornado’s blown through the kitchen.

“it can’t possibly be for my birthday, huh?” sunggyu asks, matter-of-fact, and he pushes past woohyun to pad into the kitchen. it’s a mess. he stares at the walls and the counter, and he wonders just how woohyun had managed to get eggs all over his stove. there’ll be a lot to clean up later, but for now, he turns to woohyun.

“don’t you want to help me bake a cake? i mean, not that it’s my birthday. of course not. why would it ever be my birthday, when this day isn’t the day i’ve been celebrating my birthday for the past twenty-something years?” 

sunggyu watches as woohyun’s ears perk up, as woohyun’s tail starts to wag nearly wildly, and he doesn’t stop the smile that threatens to burst across his face. the next few hours pass by in a mindless blur, and sunggyu knows that even if he won’t remember everything exactly, he’ll remember the warmth of woohyun’s hip against his own as they stand there and decorate the cake with frosting and chocolate together. 

he turns towards woohyun to tell him that they should probably put the cake into the refrigerator so that it’ll be chilled by the time they want to sit down and eat it, but there’s white rushing at him so quickly that he doesn’t have the time to react, and sunggyu’s left blinking at woohyun. his tongue flicks out experimentally to lick at what’s on his face. it’s cream. the same cream that’s in the mixing bowl in front of him. sunggyu’s eyes narrow.

woohyun licks his fingers before reaching forward and poking sunggyu on the nose, an absolutely shit-eating grin spreading across his lips. “happy birthday! you look like a reindeer, except with a white nose.” 

sunggyu stares at him for so long that woohyun’s ears start to droop, and he reaches into the bowl to grab a handful of cream and smash it into woohyun’s face. “yeah, happy birthday to me,” sunggyu echoes, watching with no small amount of vindictiveness as woohyun splutters. “but first, i think i need to pay you back for that lovely present.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy birthday sunggyu!!! #happygyuberryday!!!!!!! my son!!!!!!!!!! catch me on twt if you wanna talk about sunggyu and his very strange fixation on strawberries!!!!!!!!!!


	11. nothing's over

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where myungsoo plays two truths and a lie | g | 2407

(you have a cat and a younger brother, but you’re not sure which one loves you more.)

the second the words leave myungsoo’s mouth, the girls next to him give him shy smiles and barely-concealed tittering laughs. it’s a bonding thing, the teaching assistant explains, far too chipper and far too enthusiastic for any of it to be genuine. myungsoo doesn’t even understand why something like this is necessary when they’ll get to know the students in the class more once the semester progresses. 

besides, there’s nothing particularly interesting about himself that other people would particularly care to know about. he’s a normal kid with a normal family, and he’s fairly certain that his story’s the same as nearly everyone else’s. so he racks his brain to think of two facts about himself that are true and one that’s not, and it doesn’t surprise him at all when they correctly guess the one that isn’t true.

the rest of the class period passes by in predictable fashion. the teaching assistant passes out their syllabi and their first homework assignment, with a stern reminder that _design isn’t something you can force._ myungsoo thinks otherwise, but he supposes that he has until the day before a project’s due to really test out his suspicions.

myungsoo doesn’t have any class after this one. it’s his third year, so he’s decided to take it a bit easier since he’s gotten most of his graduation requirements out of the way. it’s not directly related to his photography and fine arts major, but he’s decided to just take an intro to graphic design class for fun. he’s packing his bag, getting ready to be on his way back to his apartment, when a hand stops him.

he looks up, and there’s a guy who’d sat on the opposite end of the classroom staring down at him. myungsoo doesn’t really remember his name, but his teeth show when he smiles and speaks. “where are you headed?”

“home, probably,” myungsoo says, shrugging on his backpack as he straightens up. “i’m myungsoo. sorry, your name was…?” 

“sungyeol,” the guy says, reaching out a hand. myungsoo takes it, and it’s warm and soft and large. “i was gonna head home, too. wanna grab lunch or something?” 

myungsoo looks up into his eyes. he’s confident, but there’s a small glimmer of uncertainty that makes myungsoo believe that he won’t be such a bad guy. “sure,” myungsoo says. “what about that place that just opened up by the library?”

sungyeol’s smile widens. “i was just about to say the same thing.” 

myungsoo learns many things about him over chicken satay and pad thai. he’s a fourth year architecture major— “i practically _live_ in the studio, ugh,” he snorts. he’s from yongin, just a half hour’s drive from their school. he doesn’t visit his parents much nowadays, but he wishes he could.

“you have a cat, right? and a little brother?” sungyeol asks abruptly, seemingly apropos of nothing, and myungsoo blinks at him.

“yeah? how’d you remember?” 

“i was listening during the game,” sungyeol snorts, and when myungsoo shifts his eyes away from him, his eyes widen. “were you even listening? oh, this kid, seriously—”

he leans over the table to tousle myungsoo’s hair, and he bats the other man’s hands away. “stop, i’m not a kid, seriously,” he huffs, petulance heavy in his voice, but he won’t lie to himself. it had felt more than good when sungyeol’s hands were in his hair. 

“what were mine?” sungyeol asks, tracing the rim of his glass of water with a finger. myungsoo can’t help but watch the orbit, staring at how each drop of water disappears and clings onto sungyeol’s skin.

“um,” myungsoo starts, and he can’t help but feel as if he’s failed some kind of test.

sungyeol sighs. “i’ve eaten dog food before, i make a fucking beautiful girl, and i’ve never been out of the country.”

“the second one,” myungsoo says decisively, and sungyeol narrows his eyes at him. 

“you seriously weren’t listening, my god.” 

myungsoo gapes at him, his mind running wild with possibilities he’s not quite sure he wants to think about. “i’m really not sure i believe you.” 

sungyeol takes out his phone and shows myungsoo some photos of him with his hair done and makeup caked on his face, a skirt pulled over his gym shorts. “it was a bet,” he explains. “some dumb high school friends and i bet on who would get the highest entrance exam score. i lost. obviously.” 

“you’re not that pretty,” myungsoo says, scrutinizing the photos as he scrolls through them. “you’re kind of average.” at sungyeol’s mock-affronted snort, though, he looks back up. “but as a guy, you’re pretty above average.” 

“look who’s talking,” sungyeol mutters, taking his phone back with the barest hint of a smile playing over his lips, and he doesn’t even notice when myungsoo steals the last skewer of chicken satay.

sungyeol walks myungsoo back to his apartment with a promise to see each other again, to which myungsoo replies that they’ll see each other in section next week.

“i mean outside of class,” sungyeol clarifies. he grins almost wolfishly, leaning down towards myungsoo like he’s going to kiss him. he hugs him instead, his arms wrapping around myungsoo’s shoulders to pull him closer before he moves away. “like, a date.” 

myungsoo’s brain is still whirring and his stomach is still fluttering when he picks up the black phone on his dresser and swipes it open, unlocking it with two fingerprint scans and two passwords. there are three new notifications, and he clicks on the most recent one before holding his phone up to his ear. “yeah?”

“jesus, what were you doing?” woohyun’s voice is crystal clear even through the connection. “anyway, whatever. don’t answer that. i saw some guy leave you at your door on the camera we installed in the ceiling. i have a new assignment for you.”

“you voyeuristic pervert, you,” myungsoo says fondly. it’s hard not to be annoyed at woohyun for too long, especially since he’s had to clean up after some of myungsoo’s messier jobs. “okay, let me tell you about that guy you saw before you tell me about how much you hate me by giving me shitty assignments.” 

(you would rather eat a dirty sock than have to sleep on dirt.)

myungsoo stares down at sungyeol’s pleading eyes, stares down at the way sungyeol’s tightly clasping his hands, stares down at the itinerary laid out on sungyeol’s lap. he sighs. “but i don’t want to.” 

sungyeol’s gaze is searching, and myungsoo knows that he’s always been like this. he’s good at reading people, and he’s good at discerning their moods, their emotions. “do you have something else to do?” 

“yeah, sorry.” there’s no way in hell he’s going to some stupid forest retreat with sungyeol and some of his work partners. he hates the outdoors more than he hates having to clean up hairballs and cat vomit from the carpet. myungsoo fakes a frown that he knows sungyeol can see right through, and he lets himself be pulled into sungyeol’s lap to be kissed silly.

myungsoo actually does have something to do next week, though. it’s not something he can tell sungyeol about, really. he’s suddenly glad that sungyeol spends so much time at the office, that sungyeol is always up to his neck in planning and designing. it gives him enough space and enough time to do his own things.

he hadn’t really expected how hard it would be to keep everything secret once they moved in together after sungyeol’s graduation. myungsoo’s lease was about to run out, anyway, and sungyeol was nice enough to let myungsoo sign his name with his. after moving in, byul had had to squeeze himself into every single nook and cranny before he relaxed enough to pad up onto the windowsill and sun himself in the morning light the way he always did in myungsoo’s bedroom window.

it’s been a year and a half now. myungsoo’s diploma hangs on the wall next to sungyeol’s, their graduation tassels pinned next to them. myungsoo’s toothbrush is right next to sungyeol’s, and they have a grocery list pinned onto the refrigerator that more often than not includes something about needing to get more dog and cat food. 

it’s been a year and a half, but myungsoo doesn’t think that aga and byul will ever really get along, but they get along well enough, if well enough means aga trying to pretend byul doesn’t exist and byul ignoring aga’s entire existence. instead, aga likes to paw at myungsoo’s ankles if he’s on the couch going over some of his next assignments, and he’ll reach down to pick her up so she can curl up next to him. he loves aga like the dog he’s never ever had.

but sometimes, she can be annoying, especially when he’s trying to sneak out at night. he’s always grateful that sungyeol sleeps like the dead, because otherwise, there’s no way he wouldn’t hear how aga always perks up when she hears him trying his hardest to get to the door and leave in silence when he has to go on some assignment. 

“shh,” he whispers every time, running his fingers through her fur and petting her head. “i’ll be back soon, okay?”

it’s getting hard, though. he’d started doing this out of tradition so many years ago as a way to repay the people who’d taken his brother and him into their care. it’s usually just small jobs— he’s said he doesn’t want to be involved in anything too big. 

it’s why they’ve given him woohyun as a handler. there are other people in the agency who want more, other people who are willing to put their lives at risk, other people who are willing to give up their youth to train, but myungsoo isn’t one of them. he’s young and he has a brother, his only remaining family member, to care for, and he wants to raise a family of his own some day, too. 

he’ll only admit it in the dead of night when he’s abroad in london or hong kong or los angeles. he’ll only admit it when he’s so unbelievably lonely he feels like his heart might shatter. he’ll only admit it when he misses sungyeol so much that he swears that he can almost see the man next to him— will only admit to himself that it’s sungyeol that he wants to settle down with, to fall asleep next to for the rest of his nights, to wake up next to for the rest of his mornings. 

he wants to quit. he wants to live a normal life, one without intelligence briefings and cameras in every inch of his apartment, and if he has to quit so he can have this, so be it. he’s made up his mind.

“i’m done,” he announces, walking into woohyun’s office one day. sungyeol’d left that morning, taking a duffel bag with him and promising not to get malaria or anything from the forest, and myungsoo had grabbed him by the ears and pulled him forward and told him that if he got malaria, myungsoo would never kiss him again.

woohyun whirls around in his chair. “you’re what? why?”

myungsoo shrugs. he’s told woohyun about what he wants for his future too many times to count, and he knows that woohyun knows already. “you know.” 

woohyun hums. “okay, but you have two more left, remember? sorry, they’re a bit bigger, but everyone else is already—”

“busy,” myungsoo finishes. he knows. he’d been briefed on his job upstairs before he’d headed downstairs to bother woohyun. “it’s okay.” 

it’s supposed to be an open and shut case. it’s supposed to be a quick one, where myungsoo can just zip into the place and get out with the files detailing the assignments of the newest judges to the supreme court. it’s not too exciting, myungsoo knows, but it’s valuable information to someone, and that’s why he has to get it.

woohyun warbles on and on in his ear about how the guy he’s fucking has the greatest thighs in the world and how he wishes he could sink his teeth into them right about now, and myungsoo has to tell him to shut up and give him the directions to the senator’s penthouse suite from the bottom floor of the hotel where the rest of the gala is taking place. he’d come dressed appropriately, black suit and tie impeccably selected and tailored to fit his body, with a mask over his face, like the rest of the attendees. 

a masquerade night to remember, the gold-filigreed invitation had said. a really fucking easy disguise, myungsoo had read instead.

he’s almost done loading the files onto his usb drive when the door opens, and myungsoo barely makes out the silhouette of a tall figure in the doorway before he hears a loud bang, and a bullet lodges itself into the wall behind where his head would’ve been had he not dropped to the ground. he yanks the drive out of the laptop, and dashes to the window, ducking to avoid the shots that follow him.

as he hoists himself over the balcony and takes a final look back, he knows he must really be missing sungyeol, because he’d thought for a second, for just a split second, that tall figure was sungyeol. but that’s impossible, because, one, sungyeol is at his dumb architecture forest retreat, and two, sungyeol isn’t even involved in this.

he tells this to woohyun when he gets back to the base, and woohyun scoffs at him. myungsoo’s perched on the desk, his legs swinging off of the edges, his mask held loosely in one hand and a bottle of soju dangling from the other.

“maybe you really do need time off,” he advises, leaning back in his chair and giving myungsoo a shit-eating grin. “maybe you wouldn’t have fucked up such an easy job and only gotten us eighty percent of what we needed.”

myungsoo kicks the handler’s spinny chair away from him, relishing the moment that woohyun’s nearly thrown off from the impact of the chair hitting the wall. he has to admit, though, that woohyun is right. he does need time off before his next and last job.

(you have never had your heart broken.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello... friends............. as some of you guys may have noticed, i'm going to be using this to dump some of the ys things i've written 8_8 don't worry, i have some wg stuff written as well ^__^ i'll probably be alternating between the two from now on, so just feel free to skip it if it's not your cup of tea. for all new readers- welcome!


	12. everyday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where woohyun is a ballad singer and sunggyu catches his eye at a singing competition | g | 1221

“introducing today’s guest on _i can see your voice_ … the nation’s chart-topping ballad singer, nam woohyun!” 

woohyun steps out onto the set with a roaring burst of applause ringing out from all around him. he bows to the audience, catching the eyes of the cameras fixed around the stage.

if he were the same age as he was when he debuted, he knows that he’d be nervous out of his mind. woohyun is older now, though, seven years older than the nineteen he’d been when he debuted. he knows the ins and outs of show business and of being a singer, and more than that, he knows this show. he’s been watching it for years, and he’s been anxiously awaiting his chance to be on it for a while now. 

when the program starts recording and the cameras start rolling, woohyun casts a nervous eye over the stage. there are six contestants in front of him, all of them posing dramatically and in different positions, holding their mics to their mouths. woohyun’s task is to guess, first through visual inspection, then through hearing and watching everyone lipsync to songs, and finally by having some of the judges help defend the contestants, who the real talented singers are. 

it’s more difficult than he’d imagined. on the first round, he has to choose two singers to eliminate out of the six, those he thinks can’t sing at all. 

number one is a man who’s probably somewhere around woohyun’s age. numbers two and four are younger girls, maybe college aged— one of them looks a bit awkward with the mic, though, and the other doesn’t. numbers three and six are older men, and woohyun thinks that both of them might be real singers. the last one, number five, is an older and heavyset woman, who woohyun thinks might be tone deaf. 

woohyun chooses the older woman and one of the younger women, numbers four and five, and he turns out to have only been right about one of them— the younger woman really is tone deaf, but the older woman has the voice of an opera singer. he watches them go, waving to them and making little hearts with his fingers. 

he watches their lipsyncs next. in this round, they’ll all lipsync over recordings, but the tone deaf contestants sing over someone else’s voice. woohyun chooses one incorrectly and one correctly again— numbers two and six. 

then there are just two: numbers one and three. this stage is the one where the contestants choose a member of the judges to defend them, and number one, the one who’s about woohyun’s age, goes first. he chooses one of the mcs to defend him after seeing if he’s a real singer or not, and the mc’s eyes widen as soon as he sees number one’s credentials.

“he’s a lawyer,” the mc says, his mouth wide open in shock after he takes off the headphones. “but he’s a great singer, seriously, just choose him.” 

“what song did he sing?” woohyun asks during the q&a session.

“one of nell’s songs,” the mc replies. “time spent walking through memories. trust me.”

number three’s defense, one of the judges goes second. “he’s really a businessman, haven’t you heard of people who gave up their singing careers to be successful in life? he’s amazing, that’s all i have to say.” 

number three won’t meet woohyun’s eyes when he looks over— a red flag. woohyun doesn’t know if it’s nervousness or if it’s a genuine inability to sing, but when he looks at number one, the supposed lawyer, he feels this spark of something racing through them. number one stares back at him with a firm gaze, and that’s when woohyun knows the decision that he has to make.

“number one, the one i want to sing with is number one,” woohyun says, and he thinks that he can see just the tiniest curl of a smile at number one’s lips as the other man goes to stand next to woohyun as they watch the penultimate stage. 

number three goes on stage, and for one heart-stopping split second, woohyun thinks that he might be wrong, that he might’ve chosen wrong. but then number three belts out a note that’s so horrifically off tune that woohyun nearly winces, and then he knows that he has a good chance of being right.

then it’s their turn. 

“are you really a lawyer?” woohyun asks as they step to the center of the stage, and number one just smiles again.

“am i?” he replies, shrugging his shoulders, and woohyun purses his lips. well, he’ll know by the next minute or so.

the music starts playing, and woohyun recognizes it almost instantly. it’s the song that he’d debuted with all those years ago, and he steals a glance at number one as the chords start to build up. there’s an unreadable expression on the man’s face, and woohyun has another prick of doubt— what if he’s wrong? he doesn’t have time for doubt, though, and he starts to sing like it’s second nature to him.

he stops after the first verse, and he takes a cautious glance at number one as the seconds drag on, at the way number one drags his feet and fiddles with his mic. woohyun finds himself unconsciously echoing all of the other judges’ desperate pleas of “please!” and “please be a talented singer, please!”

then number one starts to sing, and woohyun forgets himself. it’s a voice like none other he’s ever heard, rich and deep, and he very nearly misses the cue for the verse he’s supposed to sing together with number one because he’s too busy staring at the other man’s face. he manages to recover on time, though, and they finish the song together, their last notes drowned by the audience’s cheers. he’s won.

woohyun’s left staring at number one even as the mcs ask him to introduce himself, which he does immediately.

“i’m kim sunggyu,” number one says with a deep bow, and he brushes the awry strands of hair from his face when he straightens up again. “during the daytime, i’m really a lawyer, but i used to want to be a singer like nell when i was in school.” 

“i think you sang my song better than i sang it,” woohyun jokes, his palms suddenly sweaty around his mic, and he thinks that as sunggyu and the mcs laugh at his response, he really isn’t lying.

in a moment of spontaneity, he manages to catch sunggyu before he leaves, breaking out of his stylists’ grasp and making a break for the contestants’ waiting room. 

“sunggyu— um. can i have your number? if you ever want to talk about recording a song together or maybe working together in the future? that duet with you was really, really good. please?” woohyun asks, hoping that he doesn’t sound too desperate, and he sees sunggyu’s eyebrows rise nearly to his hairline. he’s starting to think that this might all be a bad idea before he sees sunggyu smile at him again.

“sure,” sunggyu says, and when woohyun leaves the building that day with a brand new contact in his phone, his steps feel a hundred times lighter and the sky seems a hundred times brighter. yeah, he’s won today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for those of you who were unfamiliar with this show!! i tried to explain it but i dunno if it came across clearly :-( it's one of my favs so i wanted to do a wg spin on it heheh i love the idea of a sunggyu who gave up his singing dreams to become a lawyer but is trying it out again T__T 
> 
> if you're interested, here are my fav icsyv performances: [in the same place](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY1TMDiNSq0) and [back in time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqmRuvx-CFI) *_*
> 
> edited to pimp out some other perfs heh: [friday](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxeAbEIvXw4) & [singing got better](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNhTZsMSvOU)!


	13. between me and you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where sungyeol wears thousand-dollar armani suits and myungsoo lives on sungyeol's couch | g | 1338

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — The verdict is in. After months of closed-door negotiations and contract rewrites, the MT Group and YI Group have announced in a press conference late Friday night that they will, in fact, be merging businesses in early October. 

Experts estimate that billions of won are at stake in this merger, with the upper hand clearly going to the MT Group, which has held a commanding lead in the stock prices from the past three weeks. Indeed, as the stocks closed on Friday night, MT Group holdings jumped nearly eleven points, a staggering increase from its closing value just a week ago.

Spearheading the move was the MT Group’s new CEO Lee Sung-yeol, who shows a stunning resilience and determination to uphold the legacy that his late father embodied as the founder of the group back in 1987. After taking over the position from the interim CEO and removing the interim members of the board of directors, Lee quickly instated Lee Ho-won and Nam Woo-hyun as executives, both of whom Lee met at university. 

Since then, he has worked to expand the sphere of his company’s influence by creating mergers with similarly powerful corporations and, in a move that shocked the business world, announcing his engagement to the HE Group’s Kim Sae-ron. 

_Continued on B-2._

-

when he leaves work at ten, an hour earlier than he usually leaves the towering skyscraper he’s called his second home for years, sungyeol brings home a copy of the morning paper. they’d had a celebration right before the press conference, where woohyun had popped open a bottle of champagne and howon had slung an arm around sungyeol’s shoulders and pressed a glass into his hands. 

“you deserve it,” howon had said, and sungyeol had grinned at him in tacit agreement, and now, there’s a warm and pleasant buzz in the back of sungyeol’s mind as he slips into the back of his car.

“home, please,” he says, and his driver nods at him in the rearview mirror. when he feels the engine purr to life around him, sungyeol turns his attention to the night sky around him. seoul really is beautiful at night, all twinkling lights, with the crescent moon peeking out from behind the wispy clouds. 

he exhales. it’s been a long time since he’s had time to himself to really think, but as he rolls up the paper in his hands and taps it against his thigh, he knows that he only has himself to blame. it hadn’t been easy wresting power away from the previous board and retaining control of his father’s company, and he knows that this is how he’s going to pay for it— with sleepless nights and ever-present anxieties.

it’s hard. it’s unbelievably hard having to funnel so much of his time and his energy into something that he doesn’t even know if he can live up to, and he knows that he’d be lying if he says he doesn’t hate it sometimes. it’s worth it, though— he loves the work that he does, loves the people he works with, loves the environment and the city. he just hates the fact that he has to pretend that he’s someone he’s not when he’s sitting in the boardroom, plastering on a facade of lee sungyeol, the ceo, when all he wants to be is lee sungyeol, guy who just wants to live a normal life without pretending he’s in love with someone he isn’t in love with.

his apartment is dark when he unlocks the door. he guesses that it’s to be expected, since it’s already pretty late, but he can’t help but feel a sort of irritation at coming home to a quiet place. he hangs his suit jacket up on the hanger by the door and slips off his loafers, placing them neatly in the rack by the side of the hallway. sungyeol starts to undo his tie as he walks through the hallway, passing his empty and dark kitchen and bathroom and living room, until he comes to his bedroom. there’s a small light on in there, and sungyeol edges the door open.

the silhouettes are a bit hard to make out from the distance that sungyeol’s standing away, but as he takes a few steps closer and closer, he can tell that it’s myungsoo, who’s fallen asleep with his back against the headboard of the bed, and cradling aga in his arms. sungyeol’s smile widens. he takes lighter and softer steps as he comes closer to the bed, careful not to wake either of them up, until he’s standing right by the side of the bed and gets close enough to see that myungsoo had fallen asleep with a book in his hands as well.

“myungsoo,” sungyeol croons, reaching downward to smooth a hand through the other man’s hair, and he watches as the expression on myungsoo’s face shifts from placid contentment to something resembling annoyance. he tries again. “myungsoo, wake up.” 

myungsoo shifts, and he squints up at sungyeol in the dim light of the lamp on the nightstand. “i was sleeping,” myungsoo says, barely veiled irritation now clearly present in every line of his features, but there’s still an inquisitive note at the end of his statement that tells sungyeol that he’s curious to know just why sungyeol’s woken him up.

“we got it.” sungyeol grins, brandishing the morning paper at myungsoo before letting himself fall onto the bed, on top of myungsoo. aga leaps out of his arms and onto the ground, padding away, and they watch her go before sungyeol presses himself downwards more insistently.

“ow,” myungsoo groans, and his hands come up to futilely push at sungyeol’s chest.

“let’s drink to it tonight.” sungyeol pushes his face as far as it can get into myungsoo’s, until their noses are practically smushed against each other’s and until they’re a breath away from a kiss. it’s this proximity that lets him feel, more than see, the hesitation in myungsoo’s movements.

“i can’t,” myungsoo says after a brief pause. “i had— i kind of had too much to drink at a teacher thing i was at. just a getting to know each other party, you know? all of us mentally preparing ourselves to deal with hordes of screaming toddlers. so fun.” myungsoo pushes at sungyeol’s shoulders again. “go shower, you smell sweaty. gross.” 

sungyeol can’t relate, but he grimaces anyway. myungsoo deals with so many kids on the regular, and sungyeol has no idea how he even does it. “you smell sweaty. gross,” sungyeol parrots on his way to the shower even as he shrugs off his dress shirt and tank. 

myungsoo is curled up on his side when sungyeol comes out of the shower and slips into bed, pressing himself up against myungsoo’s back. 

“what are you reading?” sungyeol asks. myungsoo still has the book from before open in front of him, and sungyeol can’t help but be impossibly nosy. 

“nothing.” he shuts the book closed before sungyeol can peek at the title, and myungsoo cranes his head back just enough that he can see sungyeol. “congrats on the merger,” he murmurs, and sungyeol leans forward to kiss him on the forehead.

“thanks, myungsoo,” sungyeol replies, looping his arms around myungsoo’s chest and pulling him closer. myungsoo smells like lavender and chamomile, the body wash that they both know sungyeol likes the smell of the most, and sungyeol presses his nose into myungsoo’s hair, breathing in deeply.

there isn’t a lot in his world that’s real. he’s grown up around self-serving politicians and bloodthirsty businessmen, all of whom are used to disgusing their true emotions and their true natures, and sungyeol is sick and tired of it. he’s sick and tired of how fake his world seems sometimes, and there are times that he just wants to walk out of his office and quit, but he knows he can’t. myungsoo isn’t one of them, though, and sungyeol will do anything to keep it that way. he has to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wau i love chaebol aus... full offense... 8_8 also check out that use of my three years of being the news editor for my school paper (lol jk my adviser would be disappointed lol)


	14. still i remember

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where woohyun writes a letter | g | 707 (!!!!)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: is sad

dear sunggyu— 

i don’t know how to say this to you. i spent so long trying to figure out the right words to say what i wanted to say, but as many nights as i spend on this, i think they’ll never be enough. by the time you read this, i’ll probably be gone. you’ll probably wake up and see this on your dresser and wonder just where you went wrong, and i’ll tell you. 

i didn’t know how to cope with it in the beginning. i don’t know how or when or where our marriage started falling apart, but fall apart it did, slowly and painfully at first, and then all at once. it started with the small things. i tried to talk to you about what to do for lunch or for dinner and you just ignored me. i was so hurt, and i don’t know if you even heard me. 

then you started drinking. sunggyu, you and i both know that you can’t handle alcohol, but every time you came home from work, you stank of soju, its scent wafting heavily over your body. you wouldn’t even let me help you get changed, and instead, you just fell straight into bed. i cleaned up your vomit from the side of the bed as much as i could, but it was impossible. there was too much.

i didn’t know what to do. i loved you so much, sunggyu, and i know you loved me, too, but i didn’t know what happened to the you that i loved so much. it was as if i was living with a stranger, someone who never spoke to me anymore. i tried so hard to speak to you about how i felt, but you never seemed to hear my voice.

you started staying out more and more often, and i started smelling other people on you. i hated you then. i broke dishes and i threw your sheets out the window and i screamed for as long as i could, but when you came home again, someone else’s cologne on you, you stepped around all the mess and went back to sleep. i hated you so much, hated the way that this continued for so many more days. 

then one day, you changed. you went out into the garden and you cleaned up the sheets, and you went into the kitchen and swept up the broken shards of glass. you showered and you washed your hair and you put it up in that style that you knew i always liked the most. i was so curious, so i couldn’t help but follow you.

i had to know what you were doing, you understand, right? i followed behind you, tailing the twists and the turns that your car made, and when you dropped by the florist to pick up a bouquet, when you walked into a sprawling sea of green with blocks of white dotting it, i followed. you stopped in front of one of them, and when i stepped so closely behind you to look at what you were looking at that i thought that it was a miracle you didn’t feel my breath on your shoulder, i saw it.

it was my name on the gravestone.

you crumpled to your knees, your hands coming up to cover your face, and all i wanted to do at that moment was to wrap my arms around you and hold you close and wipe your tears away, but i knew that those were all things that i couldn’t do anymore. i watched you cry for what felt like hours, and when you left, you laid the bouquet of flowers so lovingly on the gravestone that i felt it, too. sunflowers were my favorite flowers, and you knew that.

so— thank you, sunggyu. i want you to be happy from now on. you have a heart that’s too big not to be shared, and i know that whoever has your heart next will be a very lucky person indeed. thank you for being my partner in life, for showing me what it felt like to share my heart with someone else, and for loving me.

i love you always.

yours forever,  
woohyun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please blame twitter user @eufoeria it's all her fault anyway happy seven years infinite ^__^ i remember when you and teen top came out nearly at the same time and i thought wow these kids with the nerdy glasses are so ugly but here i am, seven years later and still so so so in love with you guys! (i'll post something happier soon......)


	15. one day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where woohyun wants to live | e | 6435

woohyun’s entire life has been set up for him. the entirety of it, the entirety of him, is something that’s been carefully curated and molded until he’s exactly what the public wants to see, until he’s exactly what his father wants to see. he’s nam woohyun, the future heir to the conglomerate his grandfather had built up from nothing from dirt and rubble all those decades ago. he’s nam woohyun, the man who will someday hold a majority share of the company’s stocks in cosmetics, in technology, in hotel administration, in anything that anyone could possibly think of.

he’s well-spoken and well-mannered, but not necessarily by choice, and he knows what the newspapers say about him. the future of korea’s manufacturing industry is bright with nam woohyun slated to take over his father’s position as ceo of the amanti group, one paper reads. speculation abounds regarding nam woohyun’s choice of executive board members: will he keep his father’s old board when he takes over or will he replace them? another paper blares out from its front page headlines, an extremely high-definition photo of woohyun at a stockholders’ conference plastered just underneath the byline.

he has a double degree in business administration and in hotel administration from seoul national university, the school he’d chosen to go to out of the slew of acceptance letters he’d received in the spring so many years ago. and even before that, he’d pored over listings of high schools throughout the country, tracing a finger over the slightly raised bumps of every school’s name and imagining having to sit for an entrance exam, and then having to select one of them. he’s never had to make that decision: the high school he’d graduated from was a private and highly selective school tucked into an affluent neighborhood of seoul, one that he’d attended from kindergarten until the day he’d left.

when reporters ask him what he does for fun, he smiles at them (controlled and calculated, just the right amount of teeth showing to put them at ease, just the right amount of laugh let out to convince them that he’s happy to answer their questions) and says, like always, that he enjoys playing futsal and composing music.

neither of which aren’t true, of course: woohyun’s spent many afternoons kicking a ball around with some of the sons of his family’s business partners, and he’d be lying if he said it wasn’t fun. it’s also not a well-kept secret of his that he sings and produces and composes: he posts snippets of what he’s working on online, and some magazines gush about him, painting him as a multi-talented genius, one with an affinity for both technical and artistic pursuits.

woohyun always lies about what he loves to do the most, though. whenever he’s asked that question, he demurs, answering the questions with another question until the conversation’s naturally led to somewhere he’s more comfortable with. he could answer that question for them, what he likes to do the most, but he’d have to give an answer that wasn’t the truth. not that he’s not good at lying, since masking his emotions and his actions and his words is something he’s learned to do well from a young age. it’s more that he doesn’t particularly feel comfortable lying to himself and saying that what he loves to do the most is anything other than acting.

woohyun doesn’t act in the normal and traditional sense of the word; what he does is more akin to pretending he’s someone he’s not. it doesn’t happen too often, but when it does, the unease and the unhappiness roiling around in his stomach and pricking at his skin, he can’t stay in his penthouse apartment (just a comfortable distance and a short walk away from the main office, built high above the ground and costing as much in rent as some people probably make in a year). on days like those, woohyun tousles up his hair, spraying it into a style he knows looks better on him than the slicked back style he wears to presentations and to conferences.

from there, it’s easy enough to throw on the clothes hidden at the back of his closet, the ones that aren’t starched white and clean, the ones that aren’t dark blazers and suits and even darker slacks, the ones that don’t feel like a vice is choking him around his neck. he’s not particularly worried about anyone finding out about the clothes: he doesn’t have a maid or a butler or anyone in his penthouse when he’s not there. it’s just hard to resist temptation sometimes, so he has to put the clothes away and pretend they’re not there.

woohyun’s always liked people who smile. he likes it when they smile, genuine and real and honest, but only because he doesn’t usually get the chance to be like that. he knows he’s good at it, good at changing his expressions to fit any situation, and he’s so good that no one’s ever called him out for being anything but genuine, but sometimes he wonders if he’s forgotten how to smile with warmth in his face. he’s tried smiling in the mirror at himself before, but he only gets as far as looking at himself in the reflection and turning away. there’s something about the hard set of his mouth, the slight downturn of it, that makes him hate the way he normally looks to the outside world. but he continues, because that’s what’s expected of him.

what isn’t expected of him is how he knows how to sneak out of the penthouse apartment, taking the stairs all the way down so not even the bellhops know he’s left. sometimes sungyeol will come with him, sometimes howon. they’re the only two people he’s kept in touch with even after they’d graduated from university, where sungyeol had come out somehow licensed to practice law and howon had gotten a contract as a civil engineer. but sometimes neither of them has time, and he’ll go on his own. today isn’t one of those days. today sungyeol comes with him, pulling up alongside the curb when woohyun exits the stairwell.

“where to?” sungyeol asks, his hands loose on the steering wheel as woohyun slips into the passenger seat. it’s unreasonably warm today, even for a summer night, and woohyun can feel his skin starting to stick to the leather upholstery. it must be a new car; he hasn’t seen sungyeol driving this around yet. maybe the firm he works for is treating him well. criminal prosecutors are usually in high demand, anyway.

“i don’t care,” woohyun replies, and he means it. sungyeol grins at him before he makes a u-turn, going the opposite direction and heading onto the highway to take them out of seoul. woohyun rolls down the window just slightly, enough to let the breeze in, and the wind whips their hair around their faces.

“i have a boyfriend now,” sungyeol says casually, apropos of nothing, but woohyun can tell by the way his fingers tighten almost imperceptibly on the steering wheel that he’s nervous.

sungyeol, the guy with nerves of steel even while facing down the most daunting of cases? nervous? for what? woohyun’s approval? he could laugh, but he supposes he’s never really expected sungyeol to settle for someone this early, not when sungyeol’s one of the most erratic and flighty people he’s ever met, but in a good way, he tells himself. “oh, really?”

“i know what you’re thinking. sungyeolie has a boyfriend? no way!” sungyeol’s eyes slant over to him for just a split second before his gaze fixes back on the road in front of him. woohyun forgets, sometimes, that sungyeol’s more perceptive than he looks, that he’s more adept at reading the tone and atmosphere of conversations than woohyun is at times. “he’s a great guy. met him during court, actually.”

woohyun’s eyebrows raise. leave it to sungyeol to find someone whom it should be fairly against a conflict of interest to go out with. “are you dating a witness? or a juror? or, no way, the defendant? damn, would you really go that far just to win a case?”

“please, i’m not that sleazy. he was the opposing counsel on one of my cases a few weeks back.” sungyeol’s hands have relaxed on the wheel, and his demeanor has changed. apparently, woohyun teasing him about being morally corrupt puts him at ease, which he won’t ever understand. “before you ask, no, i didn’t win. he told me after the verdict came out that that was one of his hardest-fought cases, though. so i asked him if he wanted to fight more with me over lunch. eight post-court lunches later, and now we’re dating.”

“that’s pretty gross,” woohyun says conversationally, like he’s just talking about the weather. sungyeol takes a hand off the wheel to punch him in the arm. “was that supposed to hurt? because i didn’t feel anything. maybe you have to hit the gym more often.”

“shut up, seriously,” sungyeol says, and although his words are short and clipped, there’s a smile tugging at his lips. “he’s seriously such an amazing person. he’s super quiet, but once he warms up to you, he won’t stop talking to you. i think you’d get along alright.”

woohyun hums noncommittally, tuning out the rest of sungyeol’s spiel. he can’t stop thinking about the relative ease with which sungyeol can date, though. he’s not a celebrity, he’s not a media darling, he’s not famous by any means. he can go out with whomever he wants and no one will give a shit. but woohyun has to go through hoops and hurdles if he wants to find someone suitable for him, someone who’s of similar class and similar upbringing and, most importantly, someone who can advance the company far more than some nobody ever could.

it makes him sick. it’s a familiar feeling, the one that’s currently burning in the back of his throat and rolling around in his brain now, but he quashes it down. he’s not about to let this ruin his night.

the place sungyeol drives them to is a club about a half hour drive from woohyun’s apartment, one that’s just a bit more on the upscale side, and it caters to a young enough clientele that woohyun’s sure nobody here ever reads the front page of any papers for businessmen. the first time woohyun had tried to go out like this with howon and sungyeol, he’d chosen a place that was too close to the financial district, too packed with aspiring entrepreneurs, and he’d been recognized instantly. nothing had happened then, since the clubgoers had seemed to only regard woohyun as some sort of curiosity, like someone they hadn’t even thought really existed outside of the dull photos from newspaper articles. since then, he’s learned from that mistake.

as soon as they get inside, they’re pulled almost instantly into the throng of bodies on the dance floor. woohyun can just barely make out sungyeol extricating himself from the crowd and pulling out his phone. to text his boyfriend, probably, and woohyun would roll his eyes if he weren’t currently pressed up against another clubgoer, flush with his chest against someone else’s back. whatever. he doesn’t need sungyeol to have fun.

he doesn’t catch the guy’s name. he doesn’t need to, not when all woohyun needs is the warm body pressed against him and the lips pressed against his. if it’s a woman’s or a man’s body against his doesn’t matter to him; he’s learned that there are things he loves about both. their movements are frantic and hurried, making the space between them warm up with their body heat, and it’s even warmer outside the club when woohyun drags the both of them outside.

he tilts the guy’s chin up and kisses him, licking into his mouth and feeling him fall apart. then there are hands twisting into woohyun’s hair, tugging his head backwards, and he only has a split second to feel mildly impressed before he’s spun back against the wall. the guy licks down his jawline, mouthing along his neck, and woohyun groans, knocking his head back against the hard brick of the building exterior.

it’s dark enough and late enough that woohyun doesn’t think there’s anyone out there to see them, so he unbuttons the guy’s jeans and palms at where he’s already half-hard. it doesn’t take much for him to come undone, woohyun’s fist moving deftly until he pants out a shuddering gasp against woohyun’s shoulder.

“here, let me,” he says, the first words they’ve spoken to one another, and woohyun lets him unzip his own jeans and work woohyun’s cock to hardness. woohyun ends up knocking his head against the wall again when he comes, the memory of the guy’s calloused fingers running up and down the length of his cock still fresh in his mind.

they’re silent when they tuck themselves back into their pants, wiping their hands on their jeans, and as they head back into the club, woohyun knows, by the way the guy’s expression takes on a more hesitant and unsure cast, what’s about to happen.

“hey, i really think you’re hot. i mean, obviously, otherwise i wouldn’t have given you a handjob in the back of an alleyway, right?” the guy laughs, and it’s not an unpleasant sound, but something about it makes woohyun’s stomach turn over. he takes out his phone and goes to the contacts page. “if you want to keep doing this, you can put your number in and i’ll message you back?”

he tells woohyun his name, too, and woohyun’s already forgotten it when he replies, “i’m seungjun.”

woohyun takes his phone, but he puts in a fake name with sungyeol’s number. serves sungyeol right for being the first one to get in a serious relationship. woohyun would feel bad about lying to the guy like this, except he’s never given anyone his real name or his real number. there’s a part of him, the pragmatic part of him, that says it’s because he wants to keep protecting his reputation and his image, and he supposes that on some part that’s true.

more importantly, though, he’s seen the way the name behind his own twists and corrupts others’ perceptions of him. his entire life had been filled with people who saw him as an extension of his family, and not an individual of his own merit, from middle school to high school to university to even now, when he’s grown and capable of making his own decisions. it’s why he’s still friends with only howon and sungyeol, out of everyone he’d met in university. sungyeol hadn’t cared at all, only taking out his earbuds to say that woohyun would still be responsible for taking out the trash, and howon had shrugged and said, “so what if you have a bit more money? you’re still you,” and woohyun had known he’d found good people to surround himself with.

the guy takes his phone back, a grin on his face that practically screams i’ll be texting you soon, and woohyun gives him his best attempt at a smile before he pushes through the crowd, looking for sungyeol. he couldn’t possibly have been gone for long enough that sungyeol would leave already, and sure enough, woohyun finds sungyeol tucked into a corner of the club, several shot glasses and more than a few empty bottles in front of him. sungyeol looks up blearily, his eyes unfocused, when woohyun smacks him, hard, on the shoulder. “whazzat?”

“let’s go,” woohyun says, and he leans over sungyeol and fishes around in his back pocket until he finds the keys. he leaves enough bills on the table to cover sungyeol’s drinks, and then he throws one of sungyeol’s arms over his shoulders and leaves. sungyeol murmurs some incoherent things as woohyun shoves him into the backseat and buckles him in as best as he can, and after he slides into the driver’s seat, he has to adjust the seat, bringing it forward to compensate for his shorter legs. he casts a dirty look at sungyeol’s prone figure sprawled across the backseat.

“long legs aren’t everything in life,” he mutters to himself before starting the ignition and then punching in sungyeol’s address into the gps to head back home.

this is their arrangement: whenever they go out, sungyeol will pick woohyun up and drive him wherever he wants to go, and while woohyun goes to look for a quick fuck and to let off some steam, sungyeol will get absolutely trashed, and it’ll be up to woohyun at the end of the night to stay sober and drive sungyeol back home. woohyun will stay the night, crashing on sungyeol’s surprisingly comfortable couch, and he’ll change into some of the spare clothes he keeps at sungyeol’s place for this exact reason so he looks presentable the next morning going back to his penthouse apartment.

this is how it’s always been, this is how it’s always worked out for them, and until the next morning, woohyun thinks that it’s a foolproof plan.

sungyeol is still out cold when woohyun wakes up. he hasn’t moved at all from when woohyun had tossed him onto his bed the night before, still haphazardly sprawled across his sheets in a way that woohyun thinks makes him look somewhat like a starfish. woohyun snickers under his breath, using his foot to gently nudge the bucket he’d found underneath sungyeol’s sink closer to the bed. he showers, a quick rinse since he doesn’t have much time, and changes into a passably nice sweater and dark jeans. as always, he knows sungyeol can’t hear him when he’s so dead to the world like this, but before he leaves, he leans in close to sungyeol’s ear, and says, like he always does, “don’t choke on your spit and die.”

it’s still a little chilly outside when woohyun steps outside of sungyeol’s apartment, locking the door behind him, and he’s suddenly glad for the stockpile of clothes he has at both sungyeol’s and howon’s places. it’s still too early in the morning for people to be up and about, so woohyun stuffs his fists in the pockets of his jeans and walks back to his place just a few blocks over. it’s just a twenty minute walk, one that takes woohyun thirty if he doesn’t use the shortcuts he’s learned, and he’s standing in front of his apartment building before he knows it.

he throws the clothes from last night in the laundry hamper, watching with no small degree of satisfaction as he manages to get everything in on the first throw, before he collapses onto his bed. it’s five, so he has about two hours to burn before the chauffeur comes to pick him up to drive him to the company building in jongno. it’s always a nice and high-end car, always a black sedan with tinted windows. after all, it wouldn’t look good for the future owner of the amanti group to arrive at the main office in anything but the kind of understated extravagance that embodies people who can afford to do that.

woohyun stares at the ceiling for what feels like hours before he rolls over and shucks off the sweater, tossing that into the hamper as well. he settles for a lighter look today, and he tells himself that the other board members are going to see it as him trying to fit in with the summer mood when he just doesn’t want to be sweating everywhere when it hits high noon. the offices are air conditioned, and so are the cars he’ll be taking to and from work, but he doesn’t want to risk it.

the chauffeur comes on time at exactly seven on the dot, and woohyun slides into the backseat, mentally preparing himself for the day ahead. he doesn’t have to do much nowadays, ever since he’d proven himself more than competent enough to handle the company and all of the responsibilities that come with it, but he’s still nervous whenever he walks through the revolving glass doors. he’s had over twenty years to stomach it, but he can’t help but crave validation and reassurance that he’ll do well.

one of the receptionists at the front desk tells woohyun that his father’s requested his presence in his office, and woohyun nods and thanks her. it’s not always that his father wants to see him this early in the morning, but he supposes that something must’ve come up urgently. it’s all part of the job.

the elevator ride up to the very top floor is suffocating, and woohyun stares at the black marble lining the walls and wills himself to calm down. he’s not a child anymore. he has nothing to be worried about. except when he walks into his father’s office, his father isn’t seated behind the desk that takes up nearly half of the entire space, but rather, he’s standing beside the desk, and woohyun starts to think that maybe he should revise his earlier assessment.

“sit down,” he says, and woohyun sits because there’s nothing in his voice that says he’s joking around. it’s only when woohyun lets himself relax and look at his father that he realizes he’s holding a thick manila folder in his hand, and he swallows, and he knows that this meeting isn’t a run of the mill meeting, that nothing good can come out of it today.

the ball drops when his father looks at him and opens the folder and says, “explain.”

there are photos in the folder. glossy and matte and eight by eleven photos of woohyun outside of that club last night, and he feels his blood turn to ice and his heart sink to his stomach. he just stares at the photographs because he doesn’t quite know what else to do, and he hears his father heave a long sigh (disappointed, angry, just like the way he’d sounded four years ago).

“i had to pay him off to get him not to release these photos. you know what would’ve happened, don’t you? are you stupid?” his father’s voice is stern, with less love than would be, than should be, expected of a parent. and woohyun knows, of course, what would’ve happened. maybe no one in the mainstream media would’ve cared, but to investors and stockholders, seeing woohyun like that would’ve meant a dip in the company’s finances.

woohyun knows what he should do. he should apologize. he should be on his knees and prostrating himself and telling his father that he won’t do it again, but for some reason, he can’t bring himself to do it. he’s tired, he realizes. he’s tired of this life, of everything that he has to do, of everything that he’s forced to do to keep up appearances and to make other people happy while reducing himself to a husk of a human being.

“no, i’m not,” woohyun says, his voice steady and calm. his father’s eyebrows raise, and woohyun can see him about to open his mouth to speak over him, but he continues. “i’m an adult, and i’m tired of this. i can’t even live, not when i can’t even have fun without people like these exist just to make my life hell, and you think i can keep playing the dutiful son? for as long as i live? seriously?”

“woohyun,” his father warns, taking a step forward, and woohyun shakes his head and stands up.

“no, i could leave right now and you couldn’t even stop me.” woohyun laughs, a cruel and sharp sound he hasn’t ever heard from his own mouth. “but you’d have to, though, right? you have no one left to make into your little puppet, ever since boohyun-hyung cut himself off. it’s been four years, hasn’t it? what if i do the same thing he did and just go? what if i just uproot my life and start over? you’ll have no one left.”

his father’s mouth thins, and woohyun knows that he’s won. it’s always been a sore subject for him, how boohyun had disappeared one day after he’d had enough. they’d thought he’d gone and done something drastic, but once they’d found him, not even threats of cutting him and his credit cards off could bring him back. the last thing woohyun’s heard from him is that he’s just opened up a restaurant in bundang and that he’s content with where he is in life. woohyun’s happy for him.

“i’m leaving now. don’t follow me,” he says, and he turns on his heel and walks out.

before he closes the door behind him, though, his father’s voice rings out. “you’ll be back.”

woohyun pretends not to hear it. he calls a taxi back to his own apartment, and once he’s inside, he collapses against the door. he presses a hand to his chest, and he feels where his heart is racing like he’s just run a marathon. the next few hours pass by in what seems like a blur now.

he remembers just bits and pieces of it: standing in front of the bathroom mirror with the packet of dye in his hands, the dye he’d always wanted to use but always held back from to avoid angering his father; pouring the dye over his hair and combing it through and having to wait an hour for it to settle; washing his now blond hair in the sink and staring back at himself in the mirror and wondering if he’s really the same person as he was before.

he grabs just a backpack, tossing his phone and as much cash as he has on hand with him into it. he doesn’t know how long he has before his cards are going to get cut off, and he doesn’t want to risk being anywhere without any money. he packs some of his lighter clothes, since he has no idea where he’ll be going, but he’s working on autopilot now, and it’s like he’s seeing himself through someone else’s eyes. he hesitates just briefly before he picks up his black card, the one that’s linked to an account he created as secretly as he could, completely free of any connections with his family, and tucks it securely in a hidden compartment of his backpack.

and then he leaves, locking the door behind him and heading down to the train station. the girl at the counter is understandably flustered when woohyun asks her when the next train is going to depart and that he wants a ticket for that one, and when she asks him what destination he’s looking for, he tells her that he doesn’t care. he nods and nods and smiles and nods and smiles again as appropriate as she rattles off some city names and times, and he says, handing her the exact amount of cash when she tells him how much the ticket is going to be, “yes, that sounds wonderful, thank you.”

he makes it to the platform with just minutes to spare before the conductor blows the whistle to leave, and he settles into the seat. the greens and the yellows and the oranges of the countryside blur into muted noise as they pass by, just smatterings of color against the backdrop of the sky. woohyun presses his palm to the window next to his seat, and he wishes, not for the first time, that the ktx train didn’t take so long. he doesn’t even know where he’s going, doesn’t even know if he’s going north or south or east or west, but he knows he’s going somewhere, and he also knows that he’s not going fast enough.

he just wants to get out.

an hour and a half later, he gets off at the stop in jeonju. he’s been to jeonju before, of course, but only in a formal capacity for business trips for the company. he’s never been to jeonju on his own, and now that he thinks about it, he hasn’t been anywhere on his own without having to meet potential investors and clients. he shifts the weight of the backpack on his shoulders. it’s an uncomfortable feeling, realizing that for all of his feelings of independence, he hasn’t been on his own for very long at all.

he hoists his backpack up just a little bit further up his back, and with no real destination in mind, he starts walking.

jeonju is more different than he’d thought. the streets are wide and open, bustling with pedestrians and drivers alike. there are posters plastered everywhere announcing the beginning of a culture festival celebrating something called hanji paper, and woohyun squints at one of them. it just looks like regular paper to him, so he moves on. bibimbap restaurants line the streets, and he figures that it must be some kind of local favorite, since all of the places he’s seen have lines stretching out of the doors.

he walks around for a bit, taking in the greenery around him, before he realizes that the sun is setting, streaks of pink and orange starting to appear on the horizon. his stomach starts to grumble, and he realizes with a start that he hasn’t had any food since breakfast, since he’d downed just an iced coffee and a granola bar in his apartment nearly twelve hours ago.

twelve hours ago. it’s only been twelve hours, even fewer than that when he considers that he’d gone to see his father hours after that, but it feels like a lifetime ago. it’s only been nine hours since he’d walked out of his father’s office, six hours since he’d dyed his hair to blond, four hours since he’d packed a backpack and left his penthouse apartment, and three hours since he’d bought the ticket to jeonju. woohyun almost misses it, if he’s being honest with himself.

woohyun shakes his head, trying to clear his mind, and he pushes the door of the nearest bibimbap restaurant open. it’s a bit quieter in this one, a little less crowded than some of the other ones he’s seen, and he decides that he likes it. it’s abundantly clear from how everyone currently seated that bibimbap is the only thing that this restaurant serves, and he sits down at the counter.

the woman behind the counter smiles at him before she disappears into the kitchen. he tries his best to smile back, but it becomes something more real, something less forced, when she brings out a bowl of rice heaped high with vegetables and meat. it’s amazing, but woohyun can’t quite tell if it’s his hunger speaking or if it’s really that good. he clears his throat, and the woman from before appears again. “a bottle of soju, please.”

“of course,” she says, and she can’t come back with his alcohol fast enough for woohyun’s taste. it burns when he downs half of the bottle in one swig, but it’s a pleasant burn, one that makes him forget everything he’s been thinking about and stressing about for so long. he stares down at his half-empty bowl of bibimbap, then at the half-empty bottle of soju, and he knows what he wants more. he finishes the rest of the rice at a methodical pace, taking his time to chew each bite, before he takes his bottle of soju and downs it in what he thinks must be record time.

“thank you. please keep the change,” he says to the woman at the counter, giving her a few ten thousand won bills, more than enough to cover his meal. the shock on her face quickly returns to the matronly expression she’d had the entire time, and woohyun knows he’ll be back someday, just for the bibimbap and the company here. he picks up his backpack and heads out again.

it’s dark now, and the only things in the inky blackness of the night are the bright lights from the buildings around him, and woohyun walks around for a bit more before he sees them. he beelines for the bright neon signs, walking past several clubs before he finds a bar, one that’s dark and not too crowded inside.

woohyun quickly forgets how much he’s had to drink. he stares down into the glass he’s currently holding, peering into it as if it holds some kind of secret, before he lifts it to his lips and finishes the rest of the shot. there are too many empty glasses in front of him, and woohyun thinks that he could drink this bar’s entire supply of alcohol dry if only they’d let him.

he feels even more miserable now than he had before, and he knows that it’s definitely all of the alcohol speaking when he starts to see his father’s face in the bottom of his shot glass. you’re useless, a failure, and a coward, his father’s face taunts, couldn’t handle the pressure, so now you’re running away, just like your idiot brother.

“shut up!”

the combination of woohyun’s voice and the clank of the glass on the bar counter is so loud he’s startled by it, and he nearly falls over and off his bar stool. he manages to steady himself, but barely, and the bartender leans over from where he’d been mixing some other drinks and says to woohyun, “i’m cutting you off now.”

“i haven’t even had that much,” woohyun protests, but his tongue feels too heavy in his mouth and he’s not even sure if he’s saying anything. maybe he’s more far gone than he’d thought, and a laugh escapes his lips as he reaches down for his backpack. he has to pay the bartender for what he drank, he remembers. he fishes some bills out of his wallet, and judging from the way he’s not stopped when he stumbles off of his seat and to the door, it must’ve been enough.

the cool air hits him in the face when the door slams shut behind him, and woohyun has to brace himself on the wall next to him so he won’t fall. the ground starts moving beneath his feet, and when he looks up, the city lights are blurry and blinking in and out of his field of vision, and he starts to realize, dimly, that he’s definitely more drunk than he’d thought.

there’s no way he’s going to make it to a hotel or any reputable living accomodation tonight like this, and he lets out a short bark of laughter that sounds harsher in the cold night than it had in his head. it must be some kind of divine karma that not even a day after he’d gotten caught by some tabloid photographer, that he’s resigned himself to sleeping on the ground outside of a seedy bar.

he figures that he might just sleep off the next few hours here, cocooned in the relative safety of the space right next to the bar, until he sobers up and his hand-eye coordination gets to the level where he can actually pull things out of his backpack without dropping things everywhere. he’s about to drift off, his backpack tied securely around his arms, when he hears two sets of footsteps approaching him. woohyun tenses up, his fight or flight instincts kicking in, until he hears a “dongwoo, it’s fine. go home, i’ll just see what’s up,” and an “okay, if you’re sure.”

“hey, you alright there?” woohyun opens his eyes, bleary and confused, when he feels his shoulder being shaken. his gaze focuses unsteadily on the person in front of him. he’s a guy who barely looks older than woohyun is, and in the sparse light filtering in from the overhead signs, woohyun can make out some sparkling glints of light. earrings and a necklace, probably.

“i’m fine,” woohyun says, and he’s surprised at how steady his voice sounds.

“you sure? where do you live? you look like you need some help getting home, so i can get you a taxi or something—” the guy’s voice sounds so earnest, so honest, that woohyun has to laugh. so he does, doubling over onto his backpack and hoping that the guy’s been scared off. but he isn’t, and he only squats down onto the ground next to woohyun.

“i don’t have a home,” woohyun manages to gasp out in between fits of laughter, and his situation is so absurd, so unbelievable that the him from just a few days ago wouldn’t have believed it at all, that tears start pricking at the corners of his eyes.

“then stay over at my place tonight,” the guy says, laying a hand on woohyun’s arm. woohyun stops laughing, and he locks gazes with the guy. he seems serious enough, but woohyun knows that he’d never, in any lifetime, go up to someone on the street and offer them a place to stay for the night. it’s just common sense of personal safety, and woohyun wonders if this guy is crazy or a murderer. or both.

the guy’s lips quirk upwards in what must be a smile, and he says, “i’m not crazy. i’m not a murderer either. i just don’t think you should be sleeping out in the cold like this. it gets cold here at night, even in the summer,” and woohyun realizes that he must’ve said that out loud.

he ponders the situation. he could stay outside in the cold and potentially freeze to death, or he could go with this guy and potentially get tortured and murdered. it seems like a lose-lose situation to him.

“i’m not going to kill you,” the guy huffs, and woohyun realizes that he must’ve said that without thinking as well.

“okay,” woohyun says, and he’s surprised when the word comes out of his mouth. his brain must have a death wish, he thinks.

“okay.” the guy’s face splits into a relieved smile, and he immediately goes to help woohyun up and off the ground. he stumbles a bit, and woohyun apologizes, even though he doesn’t know why he’s apologizing. maybe it’s because he’s heavy. the guy loops woohyun’s arm around his shoulder, and woohyun keeps a cautious hand on his backpack the entire time.

the walk to the guy’s place takes shorter than he’d expected, and when his head hits something soft and plush, probably a couch, woohyun only has time to mutter out a “thank you” before his eyes slip closed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gonna start posting all of my unfinished stuff here too heheh


	16. let us go, then, you and i

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one where myungsoo ends up a prisoner of war | e | probably 15k or so

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> noncon (but not the main couple) please be warned!

when the evening is spread out against the sky  
like a patient etherized upon a table  
let us go, through certain half-deserted streets  
let us go and make our visit

 

midday— 

myungsoo had thought himself lucky that he was the son of one of the wealthiest traders in the region. he had thought himself lucky to be born with a face like his, so handsome that even the sons of the families that lived near him had wanted to be his friend, had wanted to be something more. he had thought himself lucky, fortunate even, to have had the chance to meet traders from different regions, to have been in the company of those who hailed from high in the mountains, from the shores by the sea, from far across the plains.

he had demurred whenever those sons had come to his door, ducking his head and folding his arms behind his back. it hadn’t been that he wasn’t interested in them, not when he could feel his legs lengthening and his voice deepening, not when he could feel the first stirrings of his heat building in him. and it hadn’t been that they weren’t attractive, either; they were mostly farmers’ sons, broad-shouldered from work and tanned from the sun. but he’d been determined to find someone he could fall as deeply in love with as his parents had been with each other, once upon a time, a long time ago.

then the soldiers had come. first they had been a trickle through their town in the beginning, then they had multiplied in number, tearing through their homes and their farms. he’s been separated from his family, losing sight of his parents and of his younger brother in all of the fighting and the commotion, and the last image he has of his home, imprinted so deeply into his brain that he doesn’t think he could ever forget it even if he wanted to, is of the home he’d grown up in being set alight, burning red and darkening the sky even more than the soot grey it already was.

he doesn’t realize until they throw him in a makeshift cell with all of the other able-bodied men of their town that something is wrong. he’s shackled to the other men, the iron cuffs around their wrists chained to a metal bar on the ground. 

“are you alright?” myungsoo hears, and when he looks up, he recognizes the speaker. it’s minseok, the blacksmith’s son, who myungsoo’s always liked because of his wide smile and his even wider eyes. 

“i am,” myungsoo says truthfully. he knows that at least he has a friend here, someone whose shoulder he can lean on in these times. he shuffles forward to minseok. “and you?” 

they spend some time catching up, trying to pretend that everything is normal when in reality nothing is at all. the space between them is filled with too many silences, too many hesitant pauses, to really feel like everything is alright. myungsoo’s mind starts to wander— where are his parents? where is his brother? he knows, deep in his heart, the answer to all of his questions, but he doesn’t want to believe it, doesn’t want to entertain the idea that he might be the only one left. 

he supposes that the soldiers haven’t noticed. he wonders if there’s something wrong with their noses, if there’s a reason they’ve tossed him in the same cell as with all of the alphas and the betas when he is so clearly not one. it’s what had been bothering him about the arrangement ever since he’d been shackled there next to the others, the heady scents of the other men filling his nose. it’s why, when the dust has cleared and a sense of joy has settled over the soldiers’ areas, myungsoo tenses. 

a soldier ambles up to the cell where they’re being held, and in a voice heavy with alcohol, slurs out, with his eyes fixed in myungsoo’s direction, “hey, you. you there. the pretty one. c’mere.” 

myungsoo stiffens. he knows that most of the men here don’t understand what the soldier’s saying. most of them have never had the chance to learn anything that wasn’t directly related to crop rotations or how much to charge for a specific plant. 

but myungsoo’s father— and his chest tightens at the thought of his father— had made it a priority for myungsoo, after he was finished with the chores that had been assigned to him for the day, to sit on his father’s knee and to learn. he’d picked up bits and pieces of the dialect used in goguryeo. even during war, they still had trade with some merchants who braved the border crossing to buy spices and herbs that couldn’t be found anywhere but in baekje. his knowledge of the language is nowhere near mastery, but he can pick out bits and pieces and start to mold together understanding from that.

myungsoo stiffens even more when the soldier starts to fumble with the lock. there’s no telling what he’s here to do, not when the events of the past twenty-four hours are still fresh in his mind. then the soldier manages to get the lock of the cell open and with surprising dexterity, he unchains myungsoo’s cuffs from the central bar. myungsoo stumbles. 

“don’t touch him!” minseok yells, darting forward and trying to grab the soldier, but myungsoo’s already been thrown onto the ground, strugging to push himself up. everyone else has already turned their faces. better him than us, myungsoo knows they’re thinking. he doesn’t blame them.

the soldier jeers, a nasty grin splitting his face as he watches minseok struggle against the chains. “all of the women are dead, so i suppose you’re the next best thing. is that your boyfriend? i wasn’t aware barbarians like you could have feelings. well, he can watch.” 

myungsoo feels his blood turn to ice. 

“no,” he whispers as he’s shoved to the ground, his clothes shoved down past his hips. he’s still dressed in the same clothes he’d worn when he’d left the house that day to fetch water for his mother, the same burlap shift and pants he’d worn to bed the night before. they are very little resistance against the fingers on him.

“no,” he sobs as he’s entered, and he hates that his body is making it so easy for this to happen, slick running down his thighs and mixing with the blood. he’d never meant for this to happen this way— he’d always imagined his first time to be on a bed made of soft fabrics, to be with someone he loved and wanted to be with, not on the unforgiving dirt of the ground beneath his feet, not with a soldier whose only thoughts were to rape and to pillage and to kill.

“no,” he gasps out, his voice exhausted from screaming, his lips bloody from biting down on them too hard. the soldier comes in him, gripping myungsoo’s hips and letting out an obscene sigh, and he pulls out when he’s spent. there are many words that are different between their languages, myungsoo knows, but the word for omega (the word for alpha, the word for beta, those too) is the same. 

“a pretty omega with a tight little hole. but you won’t be quite as tight once we’re done with you,” the soldier drawls once he’s tucked himself back in, tipping myungsoo’s chin up to face him, and his voice isn’t as slurred as it had been earlier. myungsoo is too exhausted, too weak to care about what he knows is about to happen. “after all, many of us still have energy to let off. you understand, right?”

he loses count. he doesn’t think that he would’ve been able to remember even if he’d wanted to. by the fifth man, their hands and their voices had started to blur together into one, until myungsoo couldn’t tell whose hands were on him anymore. he’s glad when he opens his eyes to the drab burlap of the soldiers’ tents— at least he’s not on his stomach in front of the cell anymore. he closes his eyes again, hoping that they hadn’t watched everything, hoping that they won’t think too badly of him now.

he lies there on the ground for so long that his legs start to feel numb, although whether that numbness is from his not having moved in a long time or from the phantom presses of fingers on the inside of his thighs gripping him in place, he can’t tell. he knows that things are happening around him. he thinks that their town is probably being used as a hub for prisoners as the soldiers of goguryeo clean up the war efforts, and something inside myungsoo breaks at the thought of his home in flames again. 

it isn’t fair. it isn’t fair, but it’s how life is. myungsoo knows that even if he’d wanted to leave, he can’t. there’s a cuff around his ankle now, one that’s chained to a metal bar on the ground similar to the one he’d had in the cell. he starts recognizing the soldiers who come to use him. some of them are young, some are older. some have barely the makings of facial hair dusting the lines of their laws, some have beards that scratch myungsoo’s skin whenever they pull him closer. 

he passes his heat through there. he’s stopped caring about things like first times and first heats— he’s long since accepted ideas like those as the fancies of a boy who’d been too naive, too careless to understand the world for the hell it really was. the wetness between his thighs almost hurts, and as much as he wants to protest it, as much as he wants to squeeze his legs together and go on with his life, he can’t. strong hands pry his legs apart, and he’s knotted over and over again.

“look at the whore,” he hears. “look at his hole, look at how ready he is for us. look at him. all of baekje’s omegas must be like this. i can’t blame them for having so many children if this is what they have to come home to and knot.” coarse and callous laughter. myungsoo shuts his eyes. there’s a mixture of alpha and beta scents in the tent. he can pick them out by now, matching the scents to the way their knots feel in him. 

one of them must have decided that he’s bored, because myungsoo’s yanked up back onto his hands and knees, and without any warning at all, he’s entered in one long thrust, and before he knows it, there’s another soldier in front of him, easing his cock in between myungsoo’s lips. he tugs at myungsoo’s hair as he fucks myungsoo’s mouth, pulling at it and very nearly ripping some strands off his head.

his hair. he’d used to take great pride in his hair, combing through it and washing it until it was soft and shiny. his mother had used to braid his hair, plaiting it and twining it around his head. his father had dismissed such things as frivolities, but he and his mother had come to the mutual agreement that his hair was easier to take care of when it was up. it feels like a lifetime ago now, especially now that his hair hangs in matted tangles around his face, falling in uneven clumps onto his back and on the ground. 

his next heat after doesn’t come, and myungsoo knows what it means. he thinks that he should care more about it than he does, but he feels just about as much of an attachment to it as the soldiers had felt for the town he’d grown up in. he wonders if it will be worth it to grab the nearest rock and bash his own stomach in until nothing is left, until he can’t feel even the slightest flutterings of life growing within him. but as he drags himself into a sitting position, the rock held firmly in his hand, he hesitates. he puts the rock down. he can’t do it. he knows the hunger will take it if he doesn’t.

the next day, as he curls into himself on the ground, an excruciating pain ripping through his body, he thinks that this was what needed to happen. he brushes some of the dirt back over the blood that had come gushing out of him, and when a soldier pushes the flaps of his tent to the side, he makes a face filled with disgust at the bloody mess on the ground. “were you just dry or did the last one fuck you so hard you bled? oh well, no matter. you’ll be wet soon enough.” 

myungsoo thinks that there’s a very strange sort of irony in this— that he’s being fucked just a hand’s width from where a life which had begun here had ended. he starts laughing in the middle of it, and when the soldier pulls out before he’s done, his eyebrows furrowed in anger, myungsoo thinks that he’s about to shove his head back down and continue. he leaves instead, muttering something under his breath. good. let him spread rumors about how unstable the baekje whore is. myungsoo has long since stopped caring.

the day that the soldiers are ordered to clean up the prison camp and to bring the slaves to the general of the goguryeo army is a good day. myungsoo has no idea what it’ll bring, no idea if the people there will be crueler, no idea if the people there will be kinder, but what he does know is that it will be different. he has had quite enough of staring at the same brown burlap tents for a lifetime. 

“you’re alive,” minseok breathes out when myungsoo is pushed back on unsteady legs through the door of the cell and sent sprawling onto the dirt, and his voice is equal parts admiration and shock. “we’d all given you up for dead. after— well.” 

minseok looks away, coughing uncomfortably, and myungsoo knows what he means with a sudden, ice-cold realization. he’d seen it, what had happened that first night. of course he’d seen it. it had happened right outside the cell; there’s no way minseok (and every other man who’d been locked up in that cell with them, every other man myungsoo had grown up with, had watched turn from awkward and gangly boys to men, his brain reminds himself) hadn’t seen it.

“i am,” myungsoo says, after a short while. he /is/ fine, by all definitions of the word. he still has his ten fingers and his ten toes, and all of his senses are still here— sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. nothing’s broken, not really, and even if he’s lost some weight ever since the first day, even if he feels just a bit hollower than he had in the beginning, it’s not like he can’t recover from this. he says, louder, as if he can convince himself of it, “i am alive.” 

 

dusk— 

the general is not quite as bad as what myungsoo had expected when he’d been lined up with the others and made to stand as they were sized up. myungsoo has heard a lot about this general. about general kim sunggyu, who’d nearly single-handedly led goguryeo to an overwhelming victory over both baekje and silla. he’d looked at myungsoo, and myungsoo had felt something like fear run up his spine, and then he’d known that even if he couldn’t smell anything at all, that the general was an alpha.

he can feel minseok’s eyes on him as his chains— they are just rope, but tied in a way that myungsoo could spend days trying to get out of— are cut from his wrists, as he’s led by a man slightly shorter than he is to a tent that is just slightly larger than all of the rest. these are the general’s quarters, he knows, and when he’s left alone in there, he moves to sit in the corner of the tent. he folds his legs underneath him and looks around. 

the general’s belongings are sparse and few and far between, and although myungsoo knows that they are approaching the end of a war, he thinks that the general’s home must be like this as well. there is his bed roll, curled into itself in the other corner of the tent, and a small pile of clothing laid on top of it. there is a low table, made of burnished wood, with maps and other scraps of parchment spread all over it. 

his interest piqued, myungsoo moves over to the table. the maps are expertly drawn, fine black lines running over the parchment made even more apparent in the warm light of the candle burning next to it. he recognizes it. he recognizes the curve of the rivers drawn in with blue ink, the rise and the fall of mountain ranges. it’s baekje. he reaches out to touch the top, yearning to run his fingers down the twists and turns of the rivers, when— 

the tent opens, and before myungsoo can react and move out of the way, the general is making his way inside, staring down at myungsoo with an almost intent expression. he stares back at the general for a few seconds before he realizes he’s sitting at the general’s desk and looking at what are most likely— what are most definitely— classified documents with battle plans and formations.

he scrambles backwards as fast as he can, coming to a rest when his back is nearly pressed up against the fabric of the tent and moving so that he’s kneeling once again. “i apologize,” he says, mustering up what he remembers of the dialect he’d heard from traders from goguryeo in his childhood. “i have overstepped my boundaries, sir, i apologize.” 

the general cuts him off with a raised hand. myungsoo remembers, then, just what the circumstances for him being there are. he doesn’t understand much, but he knows that he’s been assigned to be the general’s personal slave. myungsoo swallows, a lump forming in the back of his throat— he doesn’t know what he’ll be asked to do. he doesn’t know if the general wants him for menial chores or for other things, things that’ll involve myungsoo on his back or on his knees or in other positions he hasn’t even imagined, and here he is, looking at the personal belongings of the man who has myungsoo’s life in his hands.

“can you read and write?” the general asks, and myungsoo lifts his head up. the general’s face is as unreadable as it had been just minutes before, so myungsoo supposes that there’s no answer but the truth.

“i can read, but just simple things. i am— i was a trader’s son, so i learned to read things like what types of items were being bought and sold. just—” and myungsoo searches his brain for the correct word. the dialect he’d spoken in his hometown isn’t too different from the standardized language of goguryeo, but he wants to make a good impression on the general. he doesn’t want to end up on his hands and knees for the soldiers here as well. “inventory. book-keeping. those sorts of tasks, sir. but i cannot write, since i was told that learning to do so was unnecessary.” he looks down at his fingers again. “sir.” 

“i see,” the general says, and when myungsoo looks up again, the expression on his face has smoothed out just slightly, making him look more youthful, younger than he’d seemed in full armor while being flanked by all of his men. “well?”

myungsoo stares. “sir?”

the general kneels down, his back facing myungsoo, and he says, in the most matter-of-fact tone, “you are my personal slave, are you not? my armor is quite difficult to remove on my own, so please. i would appreciate some help.” 

the armor comes off in small pieces as they sit there in silence, and the only things that break that silence are the soft and intermittent sounds of their breathing. the armor is heavy in myungsoo’s hands— even though they seem small and lightweight, they weigh more than they look from afar. once all of the armor is off, once all of the amor is laid in a small pile by the bed roll, myungsoo allows himself to look.

the general seems impossibly young, his features soft and rounded, and his eyes are curved in a way that makes him seem like he’s perpetually smiling. he wonders how old the general is, how old all of his captains are. they’d all seemed so old and battle-weary when he’d heard tales of their prowess on the battlefield, but now that he’s seen them in person, without all of their armor and all of their weapons, they seem more— human.

myungsoo knows that he should hate this general. he should loathe him with every fiber of his being for having perpetuated the near endless cycle of violence that’s taken his entire family away from him. he should want to see this man atone for all of his sins, for all of the deaths and the killings that his sword has been the bringer of. but he doesn’t. he feels a strange sort of camaraderie, almost, with the general. they are both just lost, trapped in somewhere they both would rather be leagues away from. 

“thank you,” the general says, and myungsoo starts. the general is still smiling, but it’s warmer now, and if myungsoo dares to think it, fonder. it’s only been a matter of hours, but myungsoo has always been a fairly decent judge of character, and he knows that the general is someone he can trust. he hadn’t ever been thanked, not for anything at all— not ever since the soldiers had come into their town with their swords raised and their tempers flared. 

myungsoo has no idea how to respond to this, so he bows to the general as well as he can in the cramped space, and he sits there to watch the general continue the rest of his routine. he unties his hair, letting it fall loosely over his shoulders, and he snuffs out the candles, leaving the only light in the tent the light of the moon from outside. when the general makes to go to bed, myungsoo lies down to sleep on the ground where he’s sitting.

“what are you doing?” the general asks, and when myungsoo opens his eyes and he sees the general staring at him with furrowed eyebrows. he just stares back. the general’s eyes are luminous in the moonlight. 

“i am sleeping, sir,” myungsoo replies, because he thinks that that’s an easy and simple enough answer. he readies himself to sit up, just in case the general wants him to fetch something or to begin his chores. 

“no—” the general says, and myungsoo is about to resign himself to a night of sleeplessness before the general starts fishing around in his own bed roll. he takes out an extra blanket and the pillow from under his own head and thrusts them at myungsoo. “here. use these.”

myungsoo nearly recoils. “no— sir, i possibly could not. please. use them for yourself, sir.” 

“just take these,” the general sighs, heavy and tired. “i won’t have you sleeping on the cold ground with nothing to shelter you from the elements.” he tosses the blanket and the pillow at myungsoo’s head before he lies back down. “good night, then. i hope to see you using those when i awake in the morning.”

“good night, sir,” myungsoo whispers into the air once the general’s breathing has been replaced with soft snuffles. that night, with his head comfortably resting on a pillow and a blanket drawn over his shoulders, is one of the best nights myungsoo has had ever since that day.

the general ends up being far kinder than myungsoo could ever have imagined, even in his wildest dreams. all myungsoo is expected to do is to help draw baths for the general, to help him dress and undress, to clean up his living space, and various other things. when the general outlines everything he’d like myungsoo to do for him, he’s surprised that none of it involves anything where his clothes are on the ground behind him.

he’s learned over the past few days that the general wakes with the sun, so myungsoo has to wake even earlier than that so he can fetch water for the general when the sky is still dark and the moon is still hanging low above him. there is a river that flows through the forest the army is camped at, meandering through the trees, and its current is steady and slow. it’s just a short walk from the encampment to the river, and myungsoo’s learned to enjoy the quiet moments of solitude while he can. he squats at the river’s edge, putting the empty bucket next to him as he stares at his reflection in the water.

he has no place here. he is a slave, a prisoner of war, one who is worth less than the gisaengs and the scum of society. he’s only alive because he’s useful— whether as a convenient hole to fuck or as a more convenient servant to order around, he’s only here because he’s useful. he’s grateful to the general, though. taking him in as a slave like this means that he’s the general’s slave and the general’s only. it’s one of the few blessings he can count on, to not be passed around like a common whore among the rest of the soldiers.

it’s usually quiet in the morning whenever he goes to fetch the water. it’s before dawn, after all, the other soldiers only wake after the general, his lieutenant, and the captains do. myungsoo thinks that by now, the captains (three of them, one of them much taller than the other two) should already have learned to avoid the general’s anger by not still being comfortably asleep in their bed rolls even when the call to rise sounds. they are all terrible risers, myungsoo knows. the general has spent too many hours telling myungsoo about how terrible it is to have to physically drag the captain with the bright smile and the sleepy eyes out of his bed roll every morning. 

(“woohyun is always, always, so lazy. he doesn’t even know how to get up on his own, i worry about him sometimes,” the general huffs nearly every night, his brush skidding across the page and making an errant line across all of the words he’s already written. myungsoo suspects that there’s more to their relationship than the general lets on, but it’s neither his place nor his role to say anything, so he smiles and keeps his mouth shut and continues unfolding the blankets for tonight.) 

but today, there’s something different in the air. myungsoo looks up from the water, looks all around him at the trees and the sky to see if there’s anything noticeably different. there isn’t. it’s when he bends forward to scoop water into the bucket and stands up that he hears the crunching of twigs under feet and he turns. 

one of the captains, the tall one with hair that falls over half of his face, is standing there behind him. myungsoo has never seen him wake before the bells to rise sound, but here he is in front of him.he remembers, belatedly, to bow, bending his body at an angle and hoping that whatever the captain is here for, he will have found it by the time myungsoo rises from his bow. but when myungsoo lifts his head back up, the captain is still there, his face betraying no emotion at all.

the captain takes a step forward, and myungsoo nearly instinctively takes a step backwards before he remembers what he has to do. the sky is streaked with orange and pink, marking the beginning of dawn. he’s almost run out of time to get back. he holds the bucket of water closer, lifting it up against his chest and trying to get back to the encampment. just as he’s about to brush past the captain, he’s gently pulled backwards, and he nearly seizes with fear and surprise.

“let me help you with that,” the captain says, resting his hands on the bucket. he’s taller up close, tall enough so that when myungsoo tilts his head upward to stare at the captain, he can feel the muscles in the back of his neck start to tire. it’s not a feeling he’s used to, not when everyone else in his town had been, at the most, so tall that myungsoo could just incline his head just barely upwards and he would be eye level with them. but this captain— myungsoo could stand on his tiptoes and not be his height. “it’s heavy.” 

“this is fine,” myungsoo says, tugging his bucket back to him. he doesn’t dare look at the captain’s eyes for too long. he’s not supposed to. “this is none of your concern, captain.” 

“no, let me help,” the captain says, and he wrenches the bucket from myungsoo’s grasp. myungsoo lifts his eyes back up to the captain’s, his hands slackening in shock, and he purses his lips before steadying himself. he’ll get it back, even if he has to jump. but there’s a teasing grin playing across the captain’s face when he effortlessly lifts the bucket of water up high in the air, so high that myungsoo can’t comfortably reach it. “you couldn’t reach this even if you wanted to, so let me do just this.” 

myungsoo gives up. or at least he pretends to, until the captain lowers the bucket down and he can lean forward to grab it. the captain is smarter than he looks, because the second myungsoo moves, he raises the bucket back above his head and grins down at myungsoo. “do you really think i would have made it as a captain if i fell for tricks such as those? you should think again.” 

myungsoo stares at the captain, stares at the infuriating lines of his face, stares at the hair that curls over the left side of his face and tickles his neck, stares at the way his gaze glitters with triumph and victory, and he forgets himself. he forgets his station and the fact that he’s a slave with nothing to his name but the rags on his back, and he stares at the captain with a challenge in his eyes until the captain’s silhouette becomes awash in light and myungsoo realizes, with a sinking sensation of dread, that he’s late.

the general is already gone by the time myungsoo and the captain make it back to the encampment. myungsoo stares at the empty tent, feeling his heart drop to his stomach, before he whirls on the captain. “you—”

“i what?” the captain asks, holding the bucket in a lazy and carefree hand. myungsoo notices, finally, that he’s fully dressed. it isn’t like him to be up and dressed before the sun even rises, before the general’s woken up and started a chain reaction, but here he is. 

“you made me late, you—” and then myungsoo stops. it had been one thing to act like that when he and the captain were alone, but he’s forgotten himself and where he is. he’s surrounded by soldiers, tens and hundreds of them, and the captain is a man capable of leading them to victory. he doesn’t think that he’d ever realized the full enormity of what this man could do him if he spoke out of turn yet again, but he does now. there are only daggers around him now. 

“you were late.”

myungsoo stiffens before he turns and drops to his knees, bowing with his head to the ground. he knows who it is before he even needs to see the speaker’s face. 

“i apologize. i failed in my duty to you, sir,” he says, but the general is already striding past him, his boots kicking up dust as he goes. myungsoo lifts his head just enough so that he can look behind him and see the general kicking the captain in the shins, and he suppresses a laugh when he sees the captain double over in pain, water splashing onto the ground below.

“not you, myungsoo,” the general says delicately, like he’s choosing his words the way a prince would choose which jewels to send to a lover. his eyes narrow. the captain seems to shrink under the general’s gaze, even though he is easily a head taller. “really, this man. you were not only shirking your own duties but inconveniencing others in the process? how juvenile. i believe you’re on scouting duty today. try not to let us down.” 

the general snorts before he takes the bucket from the captain’s hands, and myungsoo rises to his feet, following the general into the tent.

“is he bothering you?” the general asks, and myungsoo’s eyes immediately lower. he must catch the hesitation in myungsoo’s demeanor, because he cocks his head to the side. “you can speak truthfully to me. speak candidly.” 

“he is not,” myungsoo says after a short while. it’s the truth. he’d been annoying, but he isn’t anything myungsoo hasn’t dealt with before. “i just regret not being able to bring you your morning wash.”

“it’s fine,” the general says, waving a dismissive hand. “but if he ever tries to do anything to you, just let me know.” the general leans closer when myungsoo looks up in alarm. “if he does anything you find distasteful, tell me and i will cut his knot off for you. do you understand me? you are safe here.”

and somehow, as myungsoo looks up into his eyes, as myungsoo follows the curve of the smile that tells myungsoo that he’s carried out more than his fair share of threats, as myungsoo glances uneasily away from the silver hilt of the dagger sheathed at the general’s side, he thinks that this is a very unorthodox type of safety he’s starting to become used to.

that night, after myungsoo’s finished untying the general’s hair from its simple twists, the general stops him with a hand on his wrist. he’s been reviewing some documents, scanning the pages before folding them up and tossing them to the side with loud huffs. 

myungsoo looks down at the fingers wrapped around his wrist. they’re long and thin, and although he can feel the rough calluses created there from years of training and fighting, myungsoo thinks that they are very pretty, and if they lived in another world, that they would be better suited to do anything but hold swords and daggers. “sir?” 

“you said you didn’t know how to write, did you not?” the general turns just slightly so he can see myungsoo better. his gaze is level and unflinching, and myungsoo has to stop himself from instinctively averting his eyes.

“yes, i did, sir.” 

the fingers on his wrist tug him closer, gently and slowly, so that he’s sitting next to the general in front of the low table. myungsoo has no idea what he wants until the general presses a brush into his hand, carefully adjusting his grip, and myungsoo stares. “sir?” 

“i’ll teach you.” and the look in the general’s eyes is so steadfast, so steadily burning with an almost fiery intensity, that all of myungsoo’s protests wither away in his throat. the general retrieves some of the documents that he’d tossed onto the ground and flips them over so that the blank sides are facing upwards. pushing the open inkwell towards myungsoo, he says, “dip it in.” 

myungsoo keeps staring at the general. there’s no hint of anything particularly mean in his eyes, just earnestness and now, a mild annoyance at myungsoo’s hesitation. “go on,” he says, nudging it even closer. “it’s fine.” 

the weight of the brush is unfamiliar in his hand, his hands that have worked tirelessly for his family for years. his own hands are rough from his palms to the ends of his fingertips, and there is still dirt caked underneath his fingernails and in the lines of his hands. his hands don’t deserve to write, but—

he wants to.

“is this really alright?” myungsoo asks, a last line of inquiry just to make sure this is something the general is fine with. he eyes the documents in front of him. they were no doubt once confidential information, but he doesn’t know if they’ll be needed now for record-keeping. “to write on this?”

“it’s fine. they would’ve been tossed into the fire had i brought them home, anyway,” the general says. he plucks the topmost document off of the pile, turning it over so he can read it. “this is an inventory of chicken feed. i don’t think the court will particularly care to keep this in the archives. so here. let me help.” 

the general replaces the document back onto the pile, and he wraps his hand around myungsoo’s, dipping the brush into the inkwell and lowering it slowly to the paper. myungsoo has never felt anything quite like this, and he watches with no small amount of wonder as black seeps into the off-white sheets. 

they continue like that, and the general brings out an extra brush so that he can write out words and characters, carefully sounding them out as he does so. myungsoo copies each and every stroke that the general makes, watching intently at the way his hand moves across the paper. it’s not until the candle nearly burns out, the wax melted down to its last vestiges, that the general stills myungsoo’s hand and pushes the paper aside. 

“it’s late,” the general says, and myungsoo blinks at him, not comprehending, until he realizes just how dark it is outside. “we should sleep.” 

myungsoo gives the inkwell and brushes a longing look as he sets up the bed rolls. “is it— is it alright if we can do this again? sir?” 

the general settles into bed, smiling at myungsoo with his eyes crinkled, and he says, “of course,” before he blows out the candle. 

the next morning, the captain is at the river again. he’s fully dressed, and myungsoo wonders just why he gets ready before he has to, before even the general wakes up, just to be here. myungsoo gives him a cursory bow, brushing past him with the empty bucket in his arms, and he bends at the river’s edge, pulling his sleeve up so that it doesn’t get wet as he dips it into the water, scooping up enough so that the general can wash his face later. 

he stands, hefting the bucket up again and making for the huddle of tents, until his way is blocked. he looks up at the captain’s face. he’s wearing his hair long over his face again, and myungsoo notices, for the first time, how there’s a swath of fabric just under the hair. it’s black and made of something that looks smooth and soft. silk, myungsoo thinks. 

“good morning,” the captain says, and this time, when he moves to take the bucket away from myungsoo’s hands, myungsoo lets him. the captain looks about as surprised as myungsoo had expected, but he recovers quickly, his expression going back to the way it was before. “this is new.” 

myungsoo starts walking when the captain does, staying half a step behind him and making sure to keep his strides in line with the captain’s. “i think that had i not allowed you to take it, you would have done so regardless, captain.” 

the captain smiles down at myungsoo, his visible eye shining in the early morning darkness. “you’re right,” he allows. “did you sleep well?” 

“i did,” myungsoo says. he notices that they’re taking the longer route back to camp, the one that weaves through a longer path through the forest. he keeps quiet about it, instead watching the first pink streaks in the sky appear in the spaces between the leaves above them. “and you?” 

“i slept terribly,” the captain admits, shifting the bucket to his other hand so he can run the first one through his hair. he gives myungsoo a sideways glance and a crooked smile before he faces forward again. “i mean, my tent is right next to woohyun’s. and woohyun’s tent is loud at night now that you’re here.” 

myungsoo stares up at the captain again, uncomprehending, until all of the puzzle pieces start to fall into place slowly at first and then all at once. myungsoo sleeps lightly— he always has, ever since he’d grown of age to help out with chores— and he’d woken up in the middle of the night to find an empty bed next to him. he hadn’t dared to go outside to find the general, but he hadn’t been able to go back to sleep until the general had snuck back in again. he’d noticed that the general had smelled a little bit different, a little bit off, but he hadn’t thought much of it at the time. now he understands.

“it used to happen in his own tent, but now that you sleep there as well, he’s been demoted,” the captain says, an easy grin on his face. myungsoo mulls it over in his head. the general would have been well within his rights, and it would have been more than justified for the general to just make myungsoo sleep on the ground itself. but he’s provided myungsoo with a bed roll and elevated him to a status above the other work slaves by allowing him to work directly under him. “i suppose you should consider yourself lucky that you have never been unfortunate enough to catch them in the act.” 

myungsoo nearly trips over an errant rock in the ground, spluttering in shock at the sudden image in his head, and he braces himself for the fall. it never comes. instead, his arm is grabbed quicker than he himself can react, and he’s pulled back against a warm body. the captain is more solid than myungsoo’s thought. from afar, he looks thin and wiry, like a leaf that’ll blow away in the wind, but up close, myungsoo can tell that he’s sturdily built, his arms stronger than myungsoo had expected, and his chest is the same.

myungsoo also notices, with just a little bit of irritation, that he hasn’t spilled a single drop of water in the process. “thank you,” he says, ducking out quickly from underneath the captain’s arm and bowing. 

“it’s my pleasure,” the captain says, and he nods in front of them, where the earliest risers are beginning to come out of their tents and to get ready for the day ahead. he walks myungsoo to the general’s tent, and once they’re in front, he hands myungsoo back the bucket. “we’re back now. make sure the general’s in a good mood for the rest of the day, alright?”

myungsoo bows, keeping his eyes on the ground until he doesn’t see the captain’s feet out of the corner of his eyes anymore, and then he bends to lift up the tent flap and prepare a small basin for the general to wash up in. he tries to think about mundane things, about the trading policies of neighboring countries and territories, about the prices of silver and gold and jade and pearl, about the types of dyes that produce different colors, but he can’t stop thinking about the warmth of the captain’s body against his. 

life goes on. 

myungsoo gets used to rising before the sun does, gets used to meeting the captain by the river. he’s always there when myungsoo arrives, and every time, without fail, he snatches the bucket from myungsoo’s hand. every time, myungsoo lets him. they talk about everything and nothing at all— sungyeol asks what myungsoo had had for dinner the previous night even though he knows they’d eaten the same meal (a luxury that wasn’t supposed to be offered to a slave like myungsoo, a luxury that was afforded to the general’s personal slave myungsoo), and myungsoo asks if sungyeol had slept better the previous night. 

myungsoo gets used to drawing a bath for the general and plaiting his hair that falls down his shoulders in black waves after he’s done. the general always pats at the space beside him at the table, and where myungsoo had once hesitated, fearing that he would be assuming too much for someone like him, he sits down with ease and confidence. the general is almost impossibly patient with him. no matter how many times myungsoo asks the general to repeat a stroke order, or to rewrite a character, he does it, and myungsoo wonders, not for the first time and not for the last time, just why the general is so kind to him.

but one thing that myungsoo isn’t used to, one thing that he hasn’t felt in a while, is the eventual stirring of a fever deep within him. the general notices before even myungsoo does, delicately sniffing the air one morning and asking, “myungsoo, are you in heat?” 

and myungsoo looks down at himself, bringing his wrist up to his nose and placing a hand on his stomach, and he realizes just why he’s been feeling so itchy lately. “not yet, sir,” he replies, because it’s only the pre-heat that he’s in right now, not the heat itself. the scent isn’t as strong as it would be during his heat, “but soon, i think.” 

“i see,” the general says, his eyebrows creasing. “well, you can spend your heats in here if you would like.” 

“i couldn’t—” myungsoo tries to protest. even though the general’s tent is a bit removed from the rest of the encampment for safety reasons, he’s already inconvenienced the general far too much. it simply wouldn’t do for myungsoo to mark his scent everywhere in the tent even more during his heat, and it would be a breach of everything that myungsoo’s learned in the past months for a slave like him to take his own comfort and safety as precedence over those of his superior. “i could stay outside, or with the other slaves if you wish—”

the general levels him a steely stare. “myungsoo, i am neither blind nor deaf enough not to know what will happen if i throw an omega in heat into a camp full of alphas and betas. you will stay here, and i will keep watch outside if you wish me to. i would advise that you allow me to, out of interest for your own safety and well-being.” 

“i,” myungsoo says, lowering his eyes to the ground, and then he stops. there’s a curious lump in his throat, one that will not go away no matter how many times he attempts to swallow it. “thank you, sir. you are far too kind to me.” 

“no,” the general says, and myungsoo looks up at him when he lays his hands over myungsoo’s own. there is a small and soft smile playing over his lips, and myungsoo thinks that perhaps, in another life, he could have fallen in love with the general. but it is not the general that he likes in this life. “it should be i who should be thanking you for being kind.” 

his heat is supposed to pass quickly. he knows, from previous heats, that they’re on the shorter side, lasting from two to three days at most. that doesn’t decrease how intense they are, though, and he wonders if the general is aware of all of this— that he’s not giving up his tent for just a day or a day and a half. he might be giving it up to myungsoo for two or three days or even however long as his body wants.

it’s on the last day of his pre-heat that the general packs up his writing materials and his bed roll, and myungsoo watches him bustle about, safely ensconced in his own bed roll. myungsoo had asked earlier in the week where the general would be staying if he were to give up his own tent for myungsoo’s purposes, and the general had only smiled a small and secretive smile and said that he was fairly certain myungsoo already knew. he had. 

“i have to meet some other troops at a field not too far from here,” the general says, pulling on a set of his lighter armor. “i will be back by sundown, but if anyone is looking for me, please let them know where i am.”

myungsoo nods his assent, and the general grins at him. “please don’t burn this tent down. or the entire camp, for that matter,” he jokes, and then he’s gone. myungsoo spends a few minutes staring into nothingness, before he realizes that he feels very warm all of a sudden, like he’s feverish. but he also feels more content and sleepy, and he supposes that he must only feel warm because he’s been wrapped in the blanket for so long. he drifts off, completely and blissfully unaware.

he wakes up with a throbbing need in his stomach, insistent and curling and impatient. he can feel where he’s already started to become wet, his inner thighs slippery with slick, and he curses himself. all of his previous heats had begun in the late afternoon, and it was pure foolishness not to see this coming. 

myungsoo smells him before he hears him. the thick, heady scent of sandalwood and oranges, musty and sweet, a scent as complicated and as inviting as its owner. an alpha.

“sir? are you there? i have some documents for you.” 

the head that pokes through the tent flaps isn’t any regular foot soldier’s, and myungsoo doesn’t know if it would have been any better had the alpha been someone he didn’t know. but this man he recognizes. he recognizes the familiar style of hair, the sun-tanned skin, the bright and wide eye. the captain.

the captain freezes, his mouth slackening, and myungsoo hears a flutter that sounds like it’s coming from somewhere very far away that must be the documents falling to the ground. the captain pushes open the tent, and myungsoo knows that there is no way out, not when his own scent is so heavy in the air, seeping into every crack and every corner of the tent. not when the captain fixes a dark gaze on myungsoo, curled on the ground underneath a flimsy blanket.

it could be worse, myungsoo thinks. it could be worse for both myungsoo and for the captain. he knows that the captain is at least minimally fond of myungsoo— after all, there is no other reason he would be willing to forego an extra thirty minutes of sleep so that he can dress early and then wait by the river for myungsoo to come with his bucket in hand. myungsoo wonders just how far that fondness extends, just how far the captain is willing to take it.

there’s only one way to find out.

“please,” myungsoo says, reaching out a trembling hand, and then the captain is on him, pushing myungsoo back onto the ground and throwing the blanket to the side. he knows that the captain isn’t himself, not anymore, not when he’s so deeply in rut that myungsoo doesn’t think that he himself is capable of controlling his own actions. 

his robes are pushed up to his waist, and myungsoo has to stifle a gasp when the captain’s hands run up his thighs to spread them. myungsoo has never done this before, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the captain already has. he moves like he knows what to do, like he’s moving on a purely animal instinct at this point. 

myungsoo moans into the air when the captain pushes into him in one long thrust. he feels so impossibly full, so impossibly /alive/, and he understands now why he’d been told that at the very least, being an omega would be worthwhile for at least once a month. the captain fucks into him with a punishingly quick rhythm, the staccato of their skin meeting skin reverberating through the small tent. 

and if myungsoo had felt full earlier, he thinks that nothing could ever have prepared him for what would happen next. myungsoo stares up at the captain as he holds himself above him, beads of sweat glistening across his face and his neck. the captain, myungsoo notices, is entirely clothed, save for where he’d brushed his lower garments down and aside. then the captain stops moving, and myungsoo has barely a split second to wonder why when he feels it— feels the knot expand inside him, stretching him as far as he can go, making myungsoo his for just today. myungsoo feels the prick of tears at the corners of his eyes. he won’t cry. not now. 

myungsoo reaches up nearly blindly, feeling around to drag the captain’s face closer to him, and when he’s a breath away, myungsoo leans upwards. the captain’s lips are soft and wet, and the kiss is sweet and warm, like a summer’s day. myungsoo pulls back, exhaling, and the captain pushes him back down again, kissing him with a nearly bruising force, before he starts trailing his teeth down myungsoo’s jawline, his neck, his shoulders. 

the captain comes in him, shuddering as his release spills deep within myungsoo, his come kept firmly in place with his knot, and when he slumps forward onto myungsoo, his breath evening out, myungsoo realizes that he’s fallen asleep. he can’t move, not when the captain’s knot is still deep in him, so he takes his chance to explore the captain’s body. he runs his fingers through the captain’s hair, drags his fingertips down the captain’s cheek, brushes his thumb over the black silk ties at the back of the captain’s head. 

it would be easy, myungsoo knows. it would be easy to untie the silk, to figure out what the captain is hiding from him. but he’s terribly tired, and the captain’s body is a veritable furnace against his, so he lets himself fall asleep, wrapping his arms around the captain’s neck and his legs around the captain’s waist and settling into the warmth at his side.

he wakes with a start, blinking in the relative darkness of the tent. he can tell by the sparse light filtering in through the tent openings that it’s still light out, but that’s not the reason he’s awake. the captain is hovering above him on his elbows, his breaths heavy and quick, and myungsoo knows what he must see. myungsoo with his robes hiked up and his legs around the captain’s hips, with his skin still flushed and sweat-slick from exertion. 

the captain pushes myungsoo away, and he only has time to register a very sudden feeling of emptiness before he sees the captain’s eye widen with something that myungsoo can’t quite place. he staggers backwards, clapping a trembling hand to his mouth, and he uses his other hand to pull his own robes closed.

“sir—” myungsoo starts, but it’s too late. he’s already gone, the tent flap fluttering closed behind him. 

true to his word, the general returns just before the sun sets. he pokes his head through the tent flaps, his eyes honing in to where myungsoo’s lying on his side, and when myungsoo sees him inhaling a deep breath, his fingers stiffen on the tent flaps. myungsoo is grateful. he thinks that although the captain and the general are both alphas, the general seems almost immune to myungsoo’s heat. he nods at myungsoo, a silent gesture of understanding, before he reaches inward to drop a bowl with some bread and meats in it on the low table. the general closes the tent again and leaves.

the next two days pass in a dizzying rush of feeling, the way they always do. myungsoo reaches downwards, his fingers fumbling at his entrance, to try to get himself off, but unlike the previous times he’d done this, it doesn’t work. it’s not enough— his fingers aren’t enough now that the scent of heat which had so heavily permeated the air before has been replaced with something else, something inherently different.

he closes his eyes and tries to imagine a weight settling over him and pressing him back down onto the ground, a pair of lips on his, guiding him and pulling him forward. he imagines a long back and even longer legs, broad shoulders and a slim waist, muscled arms and thin wrists, and he comes in his hand, spilling over himself and his stomach. that’s the last one— he can feel the last vestiges of his heat trickling away, the insistent need in his body disappearing. myungsoo settles in for the night, trying to avoid the wet spots. he’ll clean it all up in the minute.

the next morning, when myungsoo wakes up earlier than he has in a while, feeling unusually relaxed and refreshed, he takes the bucket, as well as his dirtied clothes and the bed roll, to the river to fill the bucket up and to clean them off. he sits there, hunched over at the river, and tries to wash all of the stains out. his face burns at the thought of the poor soldier who’ll be given this bed roll after myungsoo’s gone, and he scrubs even harder.

he waits at the river, his bucket by his side, until the pink streaks in the sky signalling the start of sunrise start to appear above the horizon. then the oranges and the yellows, and myungsoo is still alone. when he sees the sun itself rise above the treeline, myungsoo carries his belongings with one hand and hefts the bucket with the other. it seems heavier today than it had before.

myungsoo tells himself that it means nothing at all— the captain is busy, of course. why would he continue a pre-dawn activity that has no real benefit for him? but when myungsoo gets back to the camp, he sees the captain, fully dressed and armored, chatting with some of the soldiers serving under him. myungsoo turns away, heading back to the general’s tent, and he’s surprised to see the general already there, sitting at the table and breathing in like the smell doesn’t bother him at all.

“sir,” myungsoo says, bowing and hanging his wet clothes and the bed roll on the supports outside before he enters the tent. “thank you for allowing me to use your tent during my heat.” 

“no problem,” the general says, and he pats the space next to him, motioning for myungsoo to sit down. the general’s eyes fix on him, searching. “did he force you?” 

“sir?” myungsoo asks, not understanding what the general means, before it hits him. he’s talking about the captain— how the general had known anything had happened at all when he was out is a mystery to myungsoo, but that isn’t important to myungsoo now. he thinks about it. the captain hadn’t been at fault— it hadn’t been either of their faults at all, but he thinks that if blame has to be placed on someone, it has to be on him, who’d invited him in, who’d said /please/, who’d laced his arms around the captain’s neck and drawn him closer. “no, sir, i wanted it. he didn’t force me or anything.” 

“i see.” the general leans back, although he’s still looking into myungsoo’s eyes, looking for something. he must’ve found what he’s looking for, because he smiles, then. “well, i’m glad you were able to enjoy it.” 

“thank you, sir,” myungsoo coughs. he can feel his face reddening. “but if i may, how did you know—”

“i know everything about my men, myungsoo,” the general says, and his eyes twinkle. “and now, that includes you as well.” 

they make plans to leave the encampment in under a week. after all, the general explains, the war is over. they have to return to the capital to begin building up the new nation and to return to as normal of a life as possible. there are homes to rebuild and trade routes to reopen, the dead to be buried and families to reunite. myungsoo nods and smiles as the general tells him this, but when he leaves to join the other soldiers in the festivities being held to celebrate going home, myungsoo drops the façade he’d put on for the general. 

even if he were able to get out, to leave, he wouldn’t have anywhere to go back to. his house has been razed to the ground, his family have all been killed, and he is lost with nothing to his name. but he’s a slave now, so he supposes that once the general returns to the capital, he’ll be sent to work in the mines or on the farms in goguryeo. his heart clenches. he’d been so blissfully ignorant in the beginning, so carelessly unaware of all of the horrors that would unfold as the war dragged on. he knows now that those had been the thoughts of a child.

he’s dragged out of his musings when a voice breaks through the silence that had settled over the general’s tent. “myungsoo!” 

myungsoo scrambles to his feet. he knows this voice— he knows this voice as well as he knows their owner, as well as he knows the big eyes and the open smile. minseok. “what are you doing here?” 

“quick! let’s run away,” minseok hisses, his voice coming into focus the closer he gets to the light of the candle on the table. from where he’s sitting, myungsoo can see how tired and exhausted he looks: it must’ve been a result of the work the soldiers put the other slaves— the slaves who weren’t chosen by the general to be his personal slave— through. he feels a momentary twinge of apology for them. all along, he’d been comfortable and safe even during his heat, protected by the curious generosity of the general. “while the soldiers and captains are drinking and singing— let’s leave. let’s go home.” 

myungsoo stills. this is happening too quickly, far too quickly, for him to decide. but even if there’s nothing for him in goguryeo, there is even less in baekje. “i— i can’t, minseok. i’m sorry.” 

“what do you mean you /can’t/? hurry, let’s leave before they come back, seriously, myungsoo, what are you doing?”

“i’ll stay here. i’m sorry. leave without me,” myungsoo says, and he looks directly into minseok’s eyes as he does so. he’s made his choice. minseok stares at him for what feels like an eternity before he finally speaks. 

“you’ve changed,” minseok finally says, and his voice is flat, yet accusatory at the same time. 

myungsoo searches deep in minseok’s eyes for any hint of his motives, and he sees nothing malicious. he sees just a man who wants to return to his home, to what is familiar and known, to escape a life of servitude. but minseok knows that his family are all alive, that they’d been able to escape before the soldiers had converged on their town, while myungsoo’s family are all gone, their stories lost to the pages of history. myungsoo finds no fault with that— but he’s willing to take the chance that the life he’ll make in goguryeo will be better than returning to baekje.

“i have,” myungsoo acknowledges. “but so have you.” 

another voice cuts in— “minseok, what are you doing? let’s go, we don’t have much time!” 

“myungsoo doesn’t want to come. he says he wants to stay.” 

the other man scoffs. myungsoo doesn’t know him. he must’ve been a slave from one of the other towns who’d been put in with the ones from their town. it seems that minseok has made friends here, at least. “he must’ve been a good fuck for the general then. no matter, we can leave without him.”

myungsoo thinks that’s all, but before he can react, the other man is slipping inside the tent and taking myungsoo’s chin in his hand and then a sudden pain explodes in his left cheek and when he lifts his hand up to touch his face, it comes back bloody. “that’s for spreading your legs for anyone so you can live a happy life.” he spits at the ground at myungsoo’s feet. “you blood traitor.” 

he sits there, staring at nothing, until the festivities wind down and a sudden clamor rises in the camp. 

“they’re gone! all of them!” he hears, shouted and repeated more times than he cares to remember. when the general bends to get into the tent, his expression drawn and his face tight, myungsoo sees the exact moment he sees myungsoo because the general is across the tent faster than myungsoo’s expected, and he takes a deep breath to sniff the air, staring at myungsoo the entire time, and myungsoo knows that he knows.

the last thing myungsoo remembers before he falls into unconsciousness, his eyelids slipping closed despite his will to remain awake, is the general striding away from the tent and calling out, “woohyun! howon!” 

he wakes up when the sun is high in the sky, and he panics, knowing that he’s failed the general yet again. he rushes out to find the general and to apologize, but he stops in his tracks. there’s a crowd out in the middle of where all of the soldiers have pitched their tents, and the soldiers are murmuring amongst themselves. he knows that he doesn’t really have the right to wonder, but he sneaks in between the soldiers, squeezing in the small spaces until he’s in front.

the general has his sword pointed at minseok’s throat, the sun glinting off of the blade. myungsoo nearly freezes— he does, for a split second, before he remembers that he has to stop this. there’s no doubt in his mind that they’d caught on to the escape plot, and as myungsoo looks around the clearing the soldiers have made, he notices that it’s only a small fraction of the slaves that had been with them that were brought back. the captains had done their job, but the other slaves had evidently had enough of a head start that they weren’t caught.

“stop!” myungsoo shouts, rushing through the throng of soldiers and pushing through their arms, landing to kneel on his knees next to minseok. he flattens himself against the ground, his head on the dirt and his hands pressed palm down onto the dirt. “please, sir, they did nothing wrong. please let them go.” 

he doesn’t dare look up. the general says, with ice in his voice, “the punishment for attempting to escape is death. you know this, do you not?”

“i do, sir, but please.” myungsoo feels a sudden burst of courage and confidence— if he’s to die, then he’ll do so defending his friends. “they only wished to return home, just as all the men here do— just as all the men here will be doing within a week’s notice.” 

myungsoo notices movement from the corner of his eye, so he looks up and to the side, but minseok is staring back at him. and then before he can wonder about where the sword has gone, he has the pointed tip of the general’s blade pointed under his own chin.

“you would die for your friends, then? you can still die for them after what they did to you?” the general’s voice is silky, and myungsoo thinks that this must be what animals led to the slaughter must feel like. the blade drags upward, barely a hair’s width from myungsoo’s skin, to rest against the growing bruise on myungsoo’s cheek. myungsoo sees the captain jerk almost involuntarily from where he’s standing behind the general, but he lifts his eyes to the general’s, hoping that he sees the sincerity in myungsoo’s eyes.

“i would.” 

he shuts his eyes, preparing for the inevitable. when nothing happens, myungsoo cracks open an eye, then both, to see that the general has sheathed his sword once more, and although the line of his mouth is humorless, myungsoo can see something dancing in his eyes. 

“alright, then. take these men and bring them back to where they were. but refrain from treating them as callously as you did before,” the general says to one of the higher-ranked soldiers. myungsoo half expects to be dragged along with them, but he’s left behind after they’re all gone. the captain walks forward, kneeling down and touching myungsoo’s cheek. 

“does it hurt?” he asks, and myungsoo can only stare. it hasn’t even been that long since he’s heard his voice, but he misses it already. “the general has asked me to help you dress the wound, so. if you would.” 

myungsoo follows the captain to his own tent, and once he’s sitting on the floor across from the captain, he notices several things. first, the captain’s tent is smaller than the general’s. it’s to be expected, but that means that the space between myungsoo and the captain feels smaller than it would were they in the general’s tent. second, myungsoo can still smell the captain as acutely as he had before during the heat. he hadn’t ever really noticed it, but it’s all he can notice now, his brain seeming to pick up on the slightest and subtlest change in the captain’s smell. third, that the captain’s fingers are warm and soft when he reaches forward to dab at it with some gauze and solution. 

the captain is silent the entire time, and although his fingers are gentle where they brush over myungsoo’s skin, his demeanor is cold and stoic. myungsoo wonders if he’d done something wrong. without opening his eyes, he asks, “is there a reason you’ve been avoiding me?” and then, belatedly, he adds, “sir?”

“i—” a hitch in the captain’s voice. “no, no reason at all. i’m sorry. i’ve been a bit busy lately. i haven’t been avoiding you. of course not.” myungsoo opens his eyes when the captain’s fingers leave his face. “you’re free to leave now.” 

a lie. myungsoo doesn’t stop replaying the captain’s words over in his head as he walks the short distance back to the general’s tent. a lie. he doesn’t know why the captain has been avoiding his gaze and acting as if myungsoo’s presence itself repulses him. a lie. 

he has neither the station nor the right to question the captain, though, so myungsoo steps into the general’s tent with heavy feet and an even heavier heart. he bows when he sees the general sitting there at the table like he always does. “sir, thank you so much for sparing their lives. i know not how to repay you, but please, anything that i could possibly give you as compensation is yours.” 

he opens his eyes to see the general staring at him, contemplation in his eyes. “then your life.” the general’s grin widens. “i’ll take your life in exchange.”

myungsoo freezes. “sir?” humans die. that is an irrevocable a fact as any, but myungsoo had never expected to die so soon, and in these circumstances. he supposes that if he dies for his friends, that will be a better death than any other that he can think of, but—

“not your life literally,” the general says, waving a hand in the air dismissively, as if he can banish the thought from mind. “come back to the capital with me. you can continue doing what you’ve been doing with me here, and you need not worry about being sent to work camps or anywhere of that ilk.” 

myungsoo’s breath nearly leaves his lungs, and he collapses on the ground, bowing once again. “oh, thank you— thank you so much, sir. of course. of course, i will do it. of course. anything. thank you, sir.” 

“and one more thing. if we are to live together from now on, you should know at least this,” the general starts, and his eyes disappear into half moons when he smiles in the broad way he’s doing now. he says, as if myungsoo doesn’t already know, as if myungsoo doesn’t have his name imprinted in his memory, “my name is sunggyu.” 

 

midnight— 

the rules are simple. feed sunggyu when he wants to be fed, clean sunggyu when he wants to be cleaned, put sunggyu to sleep when he wants to be put to sleep— the llst goes on. myungsoo thinks that for a general and one of the most high-ranking members of the military, sunggyu is particularly terrible at taking care of himself. 

he hadn’t had the chance to see just how terrible sunggyu was at doing anything that didn’t require mastery of a sword and a brush until he’d been brought to sunggyu’s house in the middle of the capital to be his personal slave. slave is too generous a term to describe what he does for sunggyu, though— he thinks that now, a more appropriate and fitting title for him would be the general’s personal caretaker. 

he learns that sunggyu is quite useless when it comes to waking up during peacetime, and while myungsoo is used to waking up when the sun rises, sunggyu, apparently, is not. every morning, myungsoo has to wait just outside of sunggyu’s door, his hand poised to knock, for minutes before he decides that it’s not quite worth the trouble and coughs under his breath. when he hears tossing and turning, myungsoo knows that he’s almost awake. 

there’s a surprising lack of kitchen staff in the house that sunggyu had been given by the king as a reward for his years of service. it’s a modest house, one that’s located in the center of the capital, and it’s a short walk away from the main street where most of the groceries and wares are sold. myungsoo supposes that this is why sunggyu had asked him to come back home with him— to do everything a house servant would normally do.

sunggyu initially offers myungsoo a pittance for just staying there, but myungsoo knows that he has to pay his way through. there isn’t too much that he knows how to do, but back home, he’d helped his mother with buying groceries and cooking dinner. he can do this, at least.

on a day around a week after he comes back from the camp, sunggyu accompanies him to the open-air market. there are stalls lined up on the street, with each vendor hawking a different vegetable or fruit. myungsoo notices that some stalls have chickens, with rope around their necks, kept in cages next to the produce. with sunggyu there, myungsoo doesn’t have to do anything. he follows and watches as sunggyu charms the vendors into giving them the greenest leaves of spinach and the juiciest apples. 

“did you see that?” sunggyu asks once they’re home, holding the door open so that myungsoo can slip through. he gives myungsoo the basket of groceries that they’d picked up. “you’ll be handling that from now on.”

that’s wishful thinking. myungsoo isn’t confident enough, isn’t brave enough, to do all that and more, not when he doesn’t know how they’ll react if they hear him speak. but somehow, he manages. he figures out that the vendors seem to enjoy pinching his cheeks and remarking that “the general’s servant boy is such a handsome one!” he lets them touch him like he’s something special, lets them brush their hands over his hair and pat him on the cheek. 

“give this to the general,” they say, pressing a loaf of bread or a basket of freshly laid eggs into his arms, “please tell him we are all thankful for the sacrifices he and his family made for the cause.” 

myungsoo dutifully repeats what the women had said earlier when he gets home, and sunggyu bursts into laughter, loud and throaty, when he hears it. he quiets down quickly, though, his expression straightening. “they’re good people,” he murmurs, so soft that myungsoo doesn’t know if those words were meant for his ears or not. “they really are.” 

the next week, he’s back at the market, his baskets in hand. sunggyu had mentioned that he wished to drink samgyetang, so myungsoo heads to the ginseng stall, already calculating how much the chicken will cost later on. the woman there is a kindly one, and while her face is marked with age lines, her eyes still smile. he’s in the middle of asking her how her grandchildren are when he feels something hit the back of his head, and the back of his neck suddenly feels very cold. the woman’s eyes widen in front of him, and he reaches up with an unsteady hand.

his hand comes away red and dripping wet, and he blinks, slowly turning around. the woman at the stall across from him is still poised mid-lunge. there are baskets of tomatoes spread out in front of her. he’s never seen her before, but he supposes that it all makes sense now. 

she rushes out from behind the stall, and myungsoo wonders, for a split second, if this is the day that he dies. she doesn’t have a weapon in her hand, though, with neither a knife nor anything she could hit him with but her fists. myungsoo lets it happen, lets her call him a filthy baekje dog, lets her ineffectually pummel his chest with sobs spilling from her mouth.

“my son— my dear son— give him back to me, /give my son back to me/,” she sobs, and myungsoo can’t help but look down at the top of her head. her hair, which he can tell had once been a pure shade of black, is now streaked with silvery grey strands. she must have been beautiful, once upon a time. “tell your soldiers to give him back to me, oh, my dear son, he was just seventeen—”

her protests die out when her hands are seized, and myungsoo looks up in alarm at the same time as she does. when he does, he almost immediately drops his eyes, bowing. “it’s been a while, captain.” 

the captain stares down at him, unblinking, as he gently lowers the woman’s hands, still keeping a loose grip on her wrists. “ahjumma,” he says, his voice low and comforting. “i understand your pain. i, too, had my friends and companions pass away due to the war. but it is not his fault. he had nothing to do with it.”

“captain lee,” she gasps out. she thrashes in his hold, her entire body shaking. myungsoo notices that the rest of the vendors around them have taken to averting their eyes in the way that means they are most certainly listening in. “you— you of all people should hate them for what they did to us— what they did to /you/!” 

“ahjumma,” the captain says, and he steadies her as much as he can. “i bear no ill will towards the people of baekje. they were farmers and merchants, physicians and apothecarists, vendors and soldiers, just like us. what happened to me matters not, now that we have succeeded in gaining peace. please, treat him as you would one of our own soldiers. he has lost far more than i have, after all.” 

the woman collapses in the captain’s arms, her legs unable to support her weight, and as myungsoo looks up into the captain’s eyes, he nods, his gaze flickering back to the direction where they both know sunggyu lives. he can take care of this then, myungsoo deduces. 

he doesn’t make samgyetang that night.

the captain ends up accompanying him to his grocery trips. he lives in the capital as well, although where exactly his home is, myungsoo has no idea. he goes once a week, always in the mornings of the sixth day of the week. myungsoo really should have expected it, but the captain insists on holding the baskets for myungsoo as he haggles and barters the prices down until they accept simply a bronze coin and the chance to give myungsoo a pinch on the cheek for a handful of spring onions. 

“you’re good at this,” the captain remarks as he walks with myungsoo back to sunggyu’s house, looking down at the full basket in his hands. there are three apples, six pears, half a dozen eggs, a handful of cloves of garlic, some bamboo shoots, and more radishes than he knows what to do with. “maybe you should come cook for me instead?” 

myungsoo’s head jerks sharply to the captain, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. the captain’s gaze is fixed firmly forward on the road in front of him, but myungsoo swears— he /knows/— that there’s a smile threatening to quirk at the corner of the captain’s lips.

so myungsoo says, in as demure a tone as he can muster, “i know not if i can leave the general’s service to serve you, captain. however, i’m sure that he won’t mind if you join us for dinner tonight.” he adds, the pause intentionally stretched long, “captain.” 

the heart attack he gets when he sees the basket come stunningly close to flying up in the air is almost worth watching the captain trip over his own feet, stumbling over his steps and looking at myungsoo with an expression that looks like it can’t quite decide what to be. myungsoo lets his own responding grin spread across his face, slowly and surely, and he watches as the captain composes himself again, straightening his robes and rearranging the fruits and the vegetables in the basket.

then myungsoo’s being pulled into a garden, one of the ones scattered attractively across the nicer parts of the capital. there’s a dense copse of trees to the side, and when sungyeol’s fingers unlace from where they’ve been gripping myungsoo’s wrist to drag along his arm almost absently, myungsoo notices that they’re alone. the hustle and the bustle of the market is nowhere to be heard, and the only other sound in the garden is the gentle bubbling of the small pond he’d seen in the center of it.

“captain,” myungsoo says, because he can’t say anything else. his brain feels like it’s about to short circuit when he’s so close to the captain, his back against the rough bark of the tree and his front pressed flush against the captain’s. it’s been a while since he’s noticed, but the captain seems to have gained even more height since the days they’d spent in the camp together. myungsoo doesn’t know if it’s real, though— doesn’t know if it’s just their proximity and their closeness that makes myungsoo’s heart go pit-pat pit-pat. “captain.” 

“stop calling me that,” the captain whispers, his voice barely loud enough to be heard over the faint birdsong around them. myungsoo has to crane his neck upwards so that he can see the captain’s face. there isn’t a hint of amusement or of lightheartedness in the lines of his face, but his words tell a different story. “don’t you know my name? truly, i am saddened.” 

myungsoo looks up from underneath his lashes. “i believe you know just as well as i do that it would be an immense breach of respect and of decorum to call you by your first name,” he demurs. then, seeing a flash of something— annoyance? irritation?— spark in the captain’s eyes, he says, “or would you prefer this?”

myungsoo steps up onto his tiptoes. he realizes, with no small amount of satisfaction, that the captain’s heartbeat is as frantic as his own, and he leans in so that he can murmur, his mouth so close to the shell of the captain’s ear that he could tilt his head forward just a few more breaths and have his chin resting on the captain’s shoulder, “my lord?” 

the kiss, when the captain presses myungsoo back against the trees, is even better than the one they’d shared during myungsoo’s heat. he’s spent sleepless nights laying awake in bed and thinking about the press of the captain’s lips against his own, but now, he knows that his half-formed memories can barely hold a candle to the experience. the captain licks into myungsoo’s mouth, wet and sloppy, as his hands come to rest on the jut of myungsoo’s hipbones. 

it’s only after they pull apart, the two of them panting heavily, that myungsoo realizes that he’d had his hands fisted in the front of the captain’s robes. when he lets go, there are noticeable wrinkles in them, and myungsoo flushes. “i’m sorry,” he says, even as his hands continue wandering along the captain’s sides and up his chest. “my lord.” 

“you’re not,” the captain accuses, a grin on his face. he picks back up the basket that he’d had the foresight to set down on the grass a few paces from the trees. “not at all.” 

the captain walks myungsoo back to sunggyu’s house, but now, unlike the past few times they’ve done this— the captain had never failed to walk myungsoo back, and he’d never failed to hold the basket for him until the very end— there’s something different, something /electric/ in the air. the captain looks around almost furtively when they’re a house down from sunggyu’s before he leans down and kisses myungsoo again, soft and fleeting this time. the captain smiles down at myungsoo after he pulls back. “i’ve been wanting to do that for a while now.” 

“i feel the same, my lord,” myungsoo says after they’ve walked the short distance to the front of sunggyu’s house. the captain passes him the basket, and instead of holding it in his arms and rushing inside so that he can prepare dinner, myungsoo hesitates. he looks up at the captain’s face for just long enough that he knows where to aim for, and he rises up on his tiptoes so he can kiss the captain on the cheek. “thank you,” he says, feeling his cheeks crease with dimples, “my lord.” 

“i’ll see you next week then, myungsoo,” the captain says, taking myungsoo’s free hand and squeezing it. he then reaches up so that he can tousle myungsoo’s hair. “tell the general to cut your hair, it’s getting a little bit matty. not that i mind, of course. i think it’s cute. but just in case.” 

myungsoo thanks him and bows to him, ducking inside the house. he notices that the captain doesn’t leave until myungsoo has the door shut behind him, the lock slipping closed with an air of finality. it’s only then that the captain about faces and goes back to walking in the direction they’d come from. myungsoo wonders just where the captain lives, just why he’d been accompanying myungsoo on these trips when he lives in the opposite direction. 

“did you have fun?” the general asks, apropos of nothing, when he sees myungsoo walk into the kitchen. there’s no doubt that the general knows— he knows everything about his men, after all, and the captain is one of his men, and he’d even said that myungsoo is one of his men as well. myungsoo thinks that there’s also no way that the general could have missed the smell of sandalwood and oranges floating behind myungsoo as he came into the room, the basket in his arm. 

“yes,” myungsoo says, and he feels like he must be sick or something, since he feels like his head is made of cotton and his thoughts blurred with mud. he tries not to think of the captain’s face and the captain’s smile and the captain’s wide-eyed expression when myungsoo had leaned up to kiss him on the cheek. he does, anyway. “yes, i did, sir.” 

 

there will be time, there will be time  
time for you and time for me  
and time yet for a hundred indecisions  
and for a hundred visions and revisions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dumping old wips now :(( sry for never finishing :((


End file.
